One of the sad characteristics of contemporary Western society is the tendency to embrace noble lies. These are assertions and acts that don’t square with reality, with what we see and hear—and are voiced for apparently noble social purposes. Here are a few politically-incorrect examples.
1) Debt and Deficits. At our current rate we will very soon pile up between $18 and $20 trillion in accumulated national debt. We use the euphemism “stimulus”, talk of massive borrowing in terms of percentages of GDP, and casually pontificate about “inflating” our way out of the debt. The fact is that the borrowing is now so massive that there is no way to pay back what we owe without massive cutbacks in accustomed services, and a probable decline in the apparent standard of living. I say “apparent” since many of the essentials that we are accustomed to—everything from sophisticated psychiatric counseling for long-term inmates, frivolous law suits, duplicate and needless medical procedures, to government employee expense accounts, farm subsidies, or grants to the arts and media—are not that essential and will gradually begin to disappear. Raising taxes will be in the short-term offered as a solution, but it won’t for long increase net aggregate revenue since it will eventually discourage economic activity.
And we lack both the patience and guts to cut taxes, and then use the long-term larger revenue stream, coupled with massive spending cuts, to balance the budget. In short, we will invent euphemisms like “stimulus” and “furlough” as the money runs out, and Americans adjust to a lower standard of living. One can already drive in rural central California and see roads that are cracked and full of potholes, random dogs that are not licensed, and thousands of trailer-rentals on blocks and garages-turned-into-rentals, as the government has given up on its old regulation and let large swaths revert to the 1940s and 1950s. I fear that any sixth grader from my 1965 primary school down the road could have read far better than an average contemporary high school graduate of my local community. This decline is not inevitable, given an expanding population, the prior investments of noble generations, continually evolving technology, and spreading globalization, but it is inevitable given the therapeutic culture, and present high-tax, high-spend, redistributive gospel of the present government. No one on either side of the political divide simply says the present borrowing is staggering, unsustainable, and must be paid back by real sacrifice. So we lie on, as if Greece should be our model.
2) Israel. We are inundated with constant talk of the “Middle East crisis” and “the need to restart the peace process.”
Why? Is there a new Goldstone report on Tibet? Are the American people sleepless over the divided city of Nicosia? The brutal Turkish occupation of Greek Cyprus? The rough Russian annexation of Ossetia? The callous treatment of Muslims by the Chinese?
Of course not. A noble lie is that there is a “Mideast crisis” at all. “Occupied land” is not unusual. Palestinians are no more refuges than Cypriots or Tibetans. The IDF is far more moral a military force than the Russian or Chinese or Turkish army.
The reality? Hating Israel as a unique aggressor is simply predicated on five unspoken truths: 1) rampant anti-Semitism (one can hate Jews by the loftier notion of being “anti-Zionist”; 2) fear of radical Islamic terrorists; there are apparently no radical Tibetans hijacking planes or blowing up Madrid train stations due to Spanish ties with communist China; 3) oil, oil, oil. The Cypriots cannot enlist the Greeks to withhold 500 billion barrels of oil in the Aegean from world markets. If such a fantasy were true, Nicosia would be on the front pages; 4) Israel is Western, like the U.S., and in a most un-Western neighborhood, so hating Israel is a mechanism of hating the U.S. on the cheap; 5) demography. If there were a billion-person Orthodox community energized by a half-billion Greek-speakers, we most certainly would wish to solve the “Cyprus crisis”.
The truth? Money, fear, and age-old hatreds all are masked by “principles” and “morality.”
3) Illegal immigration.
Do the math on remittances—$50 billion a year sent back to Latin America; perhaps $20-25 billion sent from California alone, mostly from illegal aliens.
The following thought will get one censored as cruel and inhuman: millions of California residents, here illegally, without English or high-school diplomas, somehow manage to rely in part on state subsidies for food, housing, education, legal help, and transportation to free up cash in the billions to be sent southward to Mexico.
In addition, much higher per capita rates of illegality, from gang activity to DUI arrests, characterize far too many of the illegal alien community, requiring state investments that outweigh the often argued advantages of increased sales taxes, Social Security deductions supposedly not drawn upon, cheap wages for unskilled labor, etc.
In other words, to suggest that a very sophisticated society is spending billions to educate, incarcerate, and treat millions from the former Third World is forbidden. And the corollary is even more bizarre still: millions risk their lives to flock northward to the United States, even as the premise of multiculturalism in the schools, affirmative action in the workplace, and the chauvinism manifested in popular culture is somehow that an oppressive Eurocentric America “owes” penance. Historians two centuries hence will remark on the anomaly of the notion that millions of Mexican nationals both wish to emigrate to the United States, but simultaneously once here to voice grievances against the culture they so wish to join—sort of like the old demonstrations against Prop. 13 when protestors used to wave the flag of the country they did not wish to return to and trample the flag of the country they so eagerly wished to remain in. A modest proposal: to send money to Latin America, one here without legal documentation would either pay a 10% surcharge on the transaction or show proof of catastrophic health care insurance.
“I fear that any sixth grader from my 1965 primary school down the road could have read far better than an average contemporary high school graduate of my local community.”
It all starts with the Ivy League schools. In the mid to late 1960s Harvard University and the other top universities implemented their affirmative action policies. Blacks and minorities were the first to enjoy the resulting inflated grades. A few years later the white students jumped on the bandwagon—and things have been all downhill since then. The rest of the colleges and high schools play follow the leader. Moreover, even most conservative parents didn’t really object to the inflated grades. They were more than thrilled that their sons and daughters received top academic honors. That stuff, however, fraudulent, looks great on a resume. Yup, there is lot of guilt to go around. There must be a concerted effort to rid our country of these disastrous affirmative action polices in both the work place and our schools. Our very future depends on it.
The estimated 5 to 7 million illegals immigrants of California are not going to be machine gunned in the streets. They are not likely going anywhere. There may only be one halfway viable answer: California must be exempted from all minimum wage laws. Tax breaks must be given to factory owners and agricultural entities willing to set up shop in the state. Marginally to functionally illiterate adults are not usually suitable for any other employment. Lower skilled jobs competing in a world market simply do not pay a lot of money.
What is going on with the rise of a leftist aristocracy?
What I think we are seeing, VDH, is “Darwin’s Flinch”…our open Western society exalts freedom to such an extent that it created a strain of leftist that seeks to destroy that very freedom.
A “liberal” used to be someone who saw injustice and wished to intellectually debate against it…to win hearts and minds. Over the past four decades, due to selective interbreeding, the liberals sired with obedient lapdogs, who merely agreed and wagged their tails, happy to be part of the pack.
Thus begat…Liberadoodles…as long as they could get a pat on the head and a scratch behind the ear once in a while, were fine as long as they got their fresh bowl of kool-aid each day. They were much weaker at intellectual debate, but they could roll over, fetch, and shake hands.
This was not a feisty enough breed, however, so they were interbred with the Olbermann Pinscher. A vicious, snarling, frothing, snappish cur that bites at real and imaginary intruders into its isolated little realm.
The original liberal has long ago been bred out of existence.
This new breed of leftist is completely closed to any notion that doesn’t come from the “playbook”. They exist to tear at the fabric of our Western culture, to wholly dominate the “facts”…as if they were born to “own them”.
And, if the facts don’t suit them…then they will hide them, or twist them to suit their needs. They adopt a regal air about themselves, because it doesn’t matter what they do…since they “own” the facts, they can never be wrong.
In the process, we have lost the greatest gift ever bequeathed to Americans…freedom of choice. The neo-leftist arrogates to himself the role of keeper of the realm, exchequer of the truth. And they cook the books. We get “truthiness”…or worse, we are told what to think, and that all matters are “settled”…prior to being debated…or even examined.
And that’s not aristocracy, VDH…that’s tyranny.
Dr. Hanson at his best !
I agree it is a mad, mad, mad world. Has there ever been a time of more extreme hypocracy and outright lies propagated by the Presidency ? Perhaps so although never in such a blatent, self rightous pontificating manner. Obama’s nose-in-the-air preaching is an insult to anyone with an IQ greater than his shoe size. One can only hope that he continues to self destruct by way of his self love before taking down everthing essential to liberty. This little angry man is on a mission to be personally admired by tyrants, adored by leftists, and forever remembered as enactor of the “new slavery” via redistributive taxation. We are witnessing Obama’s Revenge year I. Year II will be even more extreme in concert with his esculating anger about not being sufficiently appreciated – except by the likes of the well paid Katie Courac – what a pathetic joke.
“High Liberalism is now a psychological manifestation, by which the very rich, immune to both the realities of tough living and the hurt of high taxes, finds solace, self-worth, penance even, by sympathy for big government entitlement for the less fortunate whom they connive hourly to avoid.”
If there is a better quote out there, I have not seen it. Tremendous VDH
Can someone fill me in and maybe provide a link to what Dr. Hanson refers to here?
“A zillionaire Gates family, that has ensured there will be no federal inheritance taxes on their $50 billion, lectures on the benefits of higher inheritance taxes;”
I post these articles out on facebook from time to time and my liberal friends – of which, there are sometimes far too many – will jump on that as a way to refute the whole article (for instance, #9 of the 13 listed in The Obamarang – “I, me, my” which they used to impugn the entire thing).
Is it because they don’t have kids?
The articulate voice of truth is here…thank you once again, Doctor Hanson.
My advice is to go out and work with your grapevines for a spell, out in the weather…or else this clear vision will drive you nuts!
Yes Dr. Hanson, it is a mad, mad, mad, mad world, as the 1963 movie by the same name proves. What have we learned since its debut?
That the once-thriving inner-city black culture has been body-snatched by Great Society dependence?
That remarriage after all-to-easy divorce: often becomes, by definition, serial divorce?
That our Christian broadcast ministers, who need to guide us in higher discernment against political and economic shenanigans, are pioneers in shenanigan-pull-the-wool-over-your-eyes mysticism?
That clever politicians learn hypnotic ways of speech, inflection, timing and delivery from mentors like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and hoodwink media, majority voters and inner-city-undertaught idolators?
That, by majority slouch, political-correct-multi-culti thought always outranks critical thought, education, truth, the US Constitution, the Bible, common sense, justice and any poor creature who happens to be caught in the right?
That nothing can be done about all this, until something is done about all this.
That in the end we who survive insanity-amongst-us shall delight to rediscover the ancient path of truth, however, which says nothing on earth is better for amelioration on earth: than a thoroughly mad, mad, mad, mad world!
And yet another piece “right on the money” Dr. Hanson.
To approach the limits of denial, the result is a jolting shift down in standards of everything. In particular, that of economic reality, is possibly the saving grace of America. Most have to work out the “monthly’s”, and can understand home economics and the difficult choices in having 20 day money with 30 day wants.
To dictate that “you will now have 15 day money” is a pill the majority will reject.
Of course it won’t impact Al Gore – deca-millionare for the record, nor Nancy Pelosi’s next procedure.
Ever consider Al’s surname!?…
Or Pelosi, masquerading as a champion of the environment who, whether cremated or buried will leave a significant carbon footprint in CO2 emissions or non-decomposing matter in the grave.
Is this not ultimately ironic!?
We’re all mortal beings, but to how the chosen ones carry on, “everyone equal – and some more equal than others”.
An eloquent “State of the Union” proclamation! It is, indeed.a mad, mad world, but not any sense of wildly thrilling and exciting. My sole quarrel is the use of “funny” as descriptive the absolutely terrifying.
It is almost beyond possibility that he enormous reversal that will be required, as you point out, can be accomplished by a mere gaining of control of the congress. The Democrat Party must be crushed – split into two parties. We need a three party vote: the Dems and the true Socialists vs a Exceptionalist Republican Party, purged of its elitist “progressives”. Calls for a split on the conservative side are insane.
Obama/Axelrod’s inflexible communist ideology offers the greatest hope for a split on the left that would defeat them for decades.
If there was ever a time in the history of our Republic when there was a need for a great political leader to emerge, it is now. Lacking hat, a small group of truly noble Americans could articulate the cause and halt our present course towards serfdom.
Does history offer any such encouraging example, Dr. Hanson?
“…environmentalism’s most articulate advocates of small is better live in ways undreamed by the masses they wish to rein in.”
This back-to-nature virtual ludditism comes out of the 1960s counterculture and was resurrected and re-enforced with the New Age movement, which began picking up steam in the late 1980s and early 90s, engendered by a religion that is a neopagan hybrid of animism and totemism. When the “best and brightest” of that generation came of age in the entertainment industry, they utilized the newest technlogies available to produce such movies as *Revenge of the Jedi,* *10,000 BC,* and now *Avatar* to showcase the triumph of primitives (i.e. “The People”) over imperial forces that are vastly superior in technology, using sticks, stones, pluck, and a little luck to beat mechanized hulks with laser cannons (whether the Ewoks, Yagahl, or Na’vi tribes, respectively).
The victory over technology–and Western Civilization, for that matter– is celebrated at the end of those movies as a victory for Nature…
…as Lucas, Emmerich, and now Cameron bank millions–undreamed of by the masses they just advocated the supremacy of the small and meek to.
It would be really neat, though, to see any of those guys make a movie by rubbing two sticks together and praying to a tree (or at the very least setting up their studios to be non-profit enterprises while still being able to deliver the same quality).
I don’t begrudge them their fortunes and the accompanying higher standard of living (which spews more carbon accordingly). But, if they won’t lead by example, they shouldn’t begrudge others their own much smaller ones and suggest they should make them even smaller.
Dr. Hanson, what you write is always grounded in history and reality — and very helpful. Thank you. In this piece you touched on one of civilization’s lies that is at the root of the others, and about to engulf yet another sector of Americana: the lie about schooling being a way of elevating youngsters. What is roaring down the pipe toward us now will lock in underclasses in the name of schooling. Of course there are liberals’ children in “prep schools” — but even there, schooling’s curricula platforms are mind management (and mint little liberals). The charm of Arne Duncan is being deployed to impose a core national curriculum — which is quite literally a way for liberal bureaucrats to tell local schools what to teach and make them do it by cracking the whip of massive funding. To preserve the control of schooling, the open internet is being firewalled out of schools and learning online from individual smartphones is abhorrent to the schooling establishment. A kid learning openly online from his iPhone while riding a bus is beyond reach of schooling and free to follow patterns of knowledge itself (not curricula-driven).
I wish you would write something on the topic of schooling in the long view of history! Certainly, the liberated minds that invented individualism did not attend schools which limited what they could learn to the lowest common denominator. It would be instructive, I would think, to compare the liberty Athens’ young thinkers had with the boy using his iPhone on a bus.
In an effort to push back against the schooling lie, am marshalling ideas about individual interaction with the open internet at my new website Handschooling.com.
Dr. Hanson, this must stop. It is not acceptable to constantly reiterate a sane and rational world view and then offer sensible solutions. That is simply not how things work here anymore. Please try to get with the program.
Well written. While it is interwoven into your list, I would have included Demonizing the Rich. The caricature of the greedy, uncaring, evil business owner is one of the most distorted lies in existence today.
Class warfare is a cheap, pandering substitute for a sound policy strategy. It is attacking the roots of the tree which represents the ascendancy and the fruits of this great nation.
Excellent as usual, Doctor.
For those in the Administration who have convinced themselves that we can use inflation to “monetize” debt, and those outside who are cheering them on in trying it and maintaining that “deficits don’t matter” (I’m looking at YOU, Paul Krugman), I have two words;
Weimar. Germany.
By this lot’s standards, when it takes a wheelbarrow full of $100 bills to buy a 5 lb. sack of potatoes, and we are overstamping 44 cent stamps to say “$44 billion”, we’ll have achieved economic Nirvana. Those of us who will be trying to survive somewhere other than Davos, Big Sur, or Aspen may have a different take on the subject.
When that happens, I will call on Krugman to return his Nobel Prize in economics. As it will by then be obvious even to him that he really deserved an “F”.
(And hopefully, it will wipe that smirk off his face, too.)
As for the illegal immigration dichotomy, it really isn’t one. Unlike previous generations of immigrants, the present legions to a great extent see themselves as just that; legions out to “conquer” the West in the name of their own native cultures. They do not engage in “assimilation”, as those who came before them did; instead, they insist that the nations they come to change to become like the cultures they come from.
In this, they are facilitated by both cynical and power-hungry leaders in their homelands, and cynical and autocratic “intellectuals” here. All of whom have propagandized them into their present beliefs. The “intellectuals” are especially cynical in this. They are operating on the bigoted principle that as much as they, personally, hate our civilization and wish to see its downfall, they nevertheless anticipate being the rulers of what comes after it, because in their hearts they “know” that those they want to co-opt in their quest for a new, post-modern Utopia (the immigrants) are “not intellectually gifted enough” to run the world they seek to create. They will, however, “instinctively” sense the “innate superiority” of the “enlightened elite’”, and thus swear fealty to same on the spot after the Triumph.
And as Orwell once said, “There are some ideas that are so stupid that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.”
In a similar vein, Gore, Edwards, & Co. perceive no hypocrisy in their enjoyment of a lifestyle of wretched excess while berating others for merely being warm, well-fed, and not dying at age thirty-five as their ancestors did. To the self-proclaimed “nobility”, that was, and still should be, the “proper order” of things. They deeply resent the fact that the Industrial Revolution, driven by innovation and private enterprise, actually solved most of the problems (sickness, malnutrition, high infant death rates, etc.)in developed countries, that they keep going on about continuing to exist in underdeveloped countries.
The key word there is “underdeveloped”. It’s easy to tell which countries on Earth today will score the worst on those problems. They’re the ones in which people live the most like the way our ancestors did in the Gore/Edwards crowd’s idealized “Golden Age” of pre-industrial civilization. When only the nobility could count on having enough to eat, being reasonably warm in the winter, or not dying of what we now consider minor annoyances in the disease department.
To the Al Gores and John Edwards’ of the “intellectual” class, these should be “perks” restricted only to the elite’. The fact that they are not offends their sensibilities. What’s the fun of being a (small-”g”) god if the peasants live almost as well as you do?
Where we see equal opportunity, and progress, they see lese majeste’ and “revolting peasants”. In both meanings of that latter term.
Which of course leads to a perfectly legitimate question. That being, considering that our “enlightened elite’” routinely lie, cheat, and demagogue to push forward their “issues”, while simultaneously repeatedly showing their astounding ignorance of actual science and actual history, compounded by a total lack of ethics, morals, and even plain common sense- why are we still letting them make decisions for the rest of us?
To me, that seems about as sensible as, well, letting the characters in “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” run things. That is to say, not at all.
clear ether
eon
“High Liberalism is now a psychological manifestation…”
You mean “psychopathic”, Victor, leading to sociopathism.
Well said CFBLEACHERS!! The ANNOINTED Liberal-progressive-elite Democrat’s are living in a world of mendacity and hypocracy. Now their own “peons” have seen the other side of the one-eyed-Jack behavior. The Annointed have been unveiled by reading their own proclamations. There are enough honorable Democrats and Independents who are appalled at the Chicago-Obama-Axelrod-Emanuel-Durban Gangsters. Their lies are so widespread that even the monobiased Media propagandists are having difficulty keeping the facts clear in their propaganda. Go Conservatives! Go Republicans! Go American-citizen-patriots!
Much of what Professor Hanson refers to here is explicable when you realize that to many liberals and leftists, politics is less about “who gets what” and more about moral exhibitionism, a chance not only to display one’s virtue but to feel superior to those who don’t.
A small but I think significant example: Almost invariably, the cars whose rears are covered with as many bumper stickers as can be squeezed in proclaim leftist shibboleths and ideas. One or two stickers may serve an actual purpose–promote a candidate or a cause, for example, and I speak as one whose car still sports a “Save Tiger Stadium” sticker.
But no one can read a dozen such stickers on the car ahead of you in traffic and it’s dangerous to try. The purpose of adorning one’s car like this is not to increase awareness of an issue or candidate, it’s to demonstrate to the wide world that the driver is a caring, compassionate person of high virtue and goodness.
When political positions are adopted because of a sense of one’s self, as a display of one’s personality, then criticism of those positions becomes not simply debate but an assault on one’s sense of personal worth. This is one reason why people who loudly proclaim their adherence to open and tolerant discourse become vicious and enraged when their ideas are challenged.
What is the alternative to the Left?
We don’t have one. We have no real, warm bodied example or standard bearer. Let alone an entire opposition party.
We have the puppet/fool GWB, a miserable failure and The present cast of twits running for the position of GOP POTUS. (Palin excepted but face it she’s just one girl.) Talk about mad … crazy … utterly tragic.
We are living in a dead man walking society.
It’s all symptamatic of an irreversible decline. America voted for self destruction and by God we are getting it. There is no way we can survive three years of this insanity.
[...] High Liberalism is now a psychological manifestation, by which the very rich, immune to both the realities of tough living and the hurt of high taxes, finds solace, self-worth, penance even, by sympathy for big government entitlement for the less fortunate whom they connive hourly to avoid. [...]
————-*—————
The mental ward patients took over the institution – and while I wouldn’t mind them doing so elsewhere, and pursuing their projects without affecting the larger society, in our days’ America the liberals’ freedom to roam, reproduce, and influence the ways of the country is clearly pernicious, and the society is considerably weakened as a consequences of that -
NO LIBERAL ENTERPRISE EVER YIELDED POSITIVE EFFECTS UPON SOCIETY – NONE, NEVER – AND WILL NEVER DO SO -
And always conservatives and other normal members of society have to pick up the tab, sweep and fix after liberals’ destructive endeavors -
No more, over, that’s it – we must yank the ignition keys from their hands –
Bellow is a very fit companion piece dealing with the liberals’ historical divorce from reality published (of all!) by Washington Post -
“Why are liberals so condescending?/ By Gerard Alexander/ Sunday, February 7, 2010 -
Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.
It’s an odd time for liberals to feel smug. But even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation — as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a “Bolshevik plot” — and the country’s failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. “We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are,” the president told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives). [....]
… and the inventory of liberal flaws and afflictions continues @…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/04/AR2010020403698.html?hpid%3Dopinionsbox1&sub=AR
VDH: The government has given up on its old regulation and let large swaths revert to the 1940s and 1950s.
The ultimate extension is an “Abandoned Area”
which receives no government services, and whose inhabitants are no longer citizens.
As to the psychopathology of the Loony Liberal
Left, I do not know the technical term, but
there is a summary description by Heinlein
which identifies the essentials:
Hatred of humanity, hatred of self, Death Wish
“Environmentally friendly” 25,000 square foot house – $15 million.
Gulfstream jet for travel to lecture the masses on climate change – $30 million.
Smug sense of moral superiority – priceless!
From where I’m sitting all of the Tea Party convention stuff happening right now appears to be a waste of time. We’ve accumulated debt that put us into default unless we make some adult decisions. So far I have not seen one single bit of clear and unambiguous planning come out of these things saying something clear and unambiguous like”filibuster any and all deficit spending” or “zero deficit spending.”
If we do not get the republican party to put the brakes on spending in a permanent way–our country will be a second tier power like Russia within twenty years.
All I have to say to our self appointed Tea Party “leaders” is this: You are the cure or you are the cancer. Pick one.
Take this phrase as an article of faith:Anyone who says the government cannot live within its means does not want the government to live within its means.
Another great read Dr. Hanson.
Just a little footnote from history that I am sure you might appreciate.
French Revolution 1789-1799!
The actual revolt took three years.
The other seven years were spent tracking down idiot nobles and removing their heads.
“At our current rate, we will very soon pile up between 18 and 20 trillion in accumulated national debt.”
GDP (official exchange rate): $14.27 trillion (2009 est.)
Is 18 and 20 trillion in debt even sustainable?
On the ball as usual, some times you make me wonder if the anarchists have the right idea for playing musical chairs in the identity politics of life.
The US is now indeed just as exceptional as Greece is exceptional. The West (including its original incubator: Greece and the last nation to perfected the blueprint: The US) is now heading for a new D day. That is the D for Default this time.
#5 – Much of Gates’ money is now in a charitable foundation. Look here for financial data: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/Pages/financials.aspx.
I’m assuming most of the money is shielded from inheritance taxes due to the structure of the foundation. Further assuming that the foundation has the ability to pay its directors (Bill & Melinda Gates, Warren Buffet, etc.) and their heirs a very healthy stipend for management services.
“A modest proposal: to send money to Latin America, one here without legal documentation would either pay a 10% surcharge on the transaction or show proof of catastrophic health care insurance.”
I have a somewhat less modest, but better long-term proposal: end all government welfare programs… for everyone, in every form. Once that’s done, it doesn’t matter who comes or goes (provided only that they’re investigated for contagious disease or criminal records) or what they do with their own money.
With that drain on public funds ended, it won’t matter how much money anyone sends to whom because it’s theirs to do with as they wish.
a mad mad world indeed. excellent essay of terrible truths.
at least Stalin put his supporters in the gulag too.
…waiting for the entire house of congress and the senate to be sent to the north slope of Alaska
Thank you, Professor.
I particularly like the “Israel” and “Leftist aristocracy” chapters.
Very very funny , and deep.
Totalitarians hate this kind of TRUE cultural criticism.
“”"I’m assuming most of the money is shielded from inheritance taxes due to the structure of the foundation. Further assuming that the foundation has the ability to pay its directors (Bill & Melinda Gates, Warren Buffet, etc.) and their heirs a very healthy stipend for management services.”"”
Not only that, but Bill and Melinda Gates seem to have proven themselves very particular bigots. If you look at the enrollment criteria for their scholorship foundation, you read that whites are prohibited from even submitting an application.
VDH!
One of your best essays!
Your idea to tax remittances to foreign countries if the US sender can’t prove US citzenship is brilliant! But why only at a 10% rate? Try 15% or 20%.
And the best part of your idea is that who can really object? I suppose some Dems will have to be against it, but the natural opposition is Western Union. Western Union is owned by First Data Resources. FDR’s main employment centers are in Nebraska and Colorado. Cornhusker kickback Ben Nelson can’t really oppose this.
Here’s another idea regarding the decline of the US. You’ve focused on the hard stuff; taxes, economics and public debt. But you only lightly touched on the “soft” items. America is becoming – quite rapidly – a cruder, baser and crummier place.
We are become Pottersville from “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
People living in garages. Dogs roaming the streets. Drugs. Gangs. Illegitimate children everwhere.
This is the new normal. (The “new normal” is the latest buzz phrase.)
I was shocked to see a show on MTV about drag queens. The language and subject matter was sick. Sick at every level.
It started in The Summer of Love. The Clintons lead the way with Monica. Now it is the new normal.
Whatever happened to the Virtues? When our opinion leaders are Donald Trump and Howard Stern, then we get “Jersey Shore” on MTV.
Combine the “hard” realities of the numbers with the “soft” cultural problems, and things aren’t looking too good.
Dr. Hanson:
I’ve said this before, but let me once again express my thanks for providing an island of rational discussion in a sea of invective. May I provide a few truths that complement the lies you’ve exposed?
Debt and Deficits: I was disgusted by the profligate ways of the Republicans during the Bush years. In many ways, they spent like drunken sailors, which is merely another way of saying that they spent like leftists. At least drunken sailors have the saving grace of actually serving, rather than deconstructing, freedom and democracy. Yet I don’t recall Republicans spouting the kinds of lunatic lies currently being so blithely belched by the Dems. We have to spend to save. We can spend out way out of financial difficulties. Obamacare will save money by spending heretofore untold sums of cash we don’t have. Obamacare will will lower insurance premiums by raising them, lower taxes by raising them, and now, is absolutely necessary to create jobs. Bush spent too much money, so we’ll fix it by spending more money we don’t have than Bush–or anyone–could have possibly imagined. All of these are lies. Truth: Don’t spend money you don’t have. Don’t throw good money after bad. Don’t borrow money you can’t pay back. Don’t make promises, financial and otherwise, that you can’t keep, and keep the promises you make. Only when our political class understands the essential, daily, don’t-overdraw-the-checking-account reality of these simple truths, the truths by which responsible, “average” Americans live their lives, can any of us rest easy and have hope in America’s future.
Israel: Nowhere is President Obama’s lack of understanding of history–and his unwillingness and inability to learn its lessons–more apparent. Only recently has he admitted that solving the “crisis” was difficult. For a god, this must have been a humbling realization. Yet, how could any rational being have failed to understand that? Truth: If Israel unilaterally disarmed tomorrow, the result would be a second Holocaust. If Israel’s enemies did the same, the result would be peace. All of the difficulties that have escaped our President, the most brilliant man in human history, can be boiled down into those two simple truths.
Illegal Immigration: No nation can exist without effective control of its borders, and without requiring than all immigrants assimilate, completely and quickly. America is no longer so wealthy that she can financially support those who will not assimilate and who wish her ill. In reality, she never was. Truth: Citizenship must mean something. We must control our borders, allowing in only those who will truly contribute to America rather than degrade her. Assimilation can never be open for debate. America is special and precious; immigration is not a right or entitlement but a precious gift to be earned.
The Image of the United States: Truth: America is the shining city on the hill, the last, best hope of mankind. America has no obligation, moral or otherwise, to support or aid those who spit on her. Nations should either be our allies, and behave that way, or not. No American should abide anyone saying otherwise, particularly not the President of the United States. Those who truly believe otherwise should be required to find support–in every way–from other nations that are more pleasing to their elite sensibilities.
Leftist Aristocracy: As Margaret Thatcher observed about Socialism, the problem is that you always run out of other people’s money. The leftist aristocracy are sawing off the limb on which they stand, and using a very large and expensively gold-plated chainsaw to do it. Until they understand that their lunatic policies are destructive of the very democracy that makes possible their enrichment, they are in danger of unleashing forces that they can’t imagine. The true power of America resides in the people, the same people leftists so disdain. Americans will stand by while Al Gore and his ilk live in their own versions of Versailles only so long as democracy endures and every man has the potential to achieve all that their intellect an industry can accomplish. Should our leftist betters succeed in bankrupting the nation, they’ll discover to their horror that Americans are not Europeans and that revolution is in our blood. By spitting on the people, by pursuing the kind of wealth and power they covet, leftists sew the seeds of their own horrific demise. Truth: Be careful for what you ask; you just might get it. Lies always, always, catch up to us.
Yet rarely is voiced the common denominator. High Liberalism is now a psychological manifestation, by which the very rich, immune to both the realities of tough living and the hurt of high taxes, finds solace, self-worth, penance even, by sympathy for big government entitlement for the less fortunate whom they connive hourly to avoid.
I learned that reading of the dismay, disdain and downright fury evinced by wealthy San Franciscans at the “homeless” who dared defecate in or near their front yards.
Rank has its privileges and compassion, obviously, has its limits.
…environmentalism’s most articulate advocates of small is better live in ways undreamed by the masses they wish to rein in.
Poster Child, this current POTUS.
Rangel, Geithner, or Daschle…
Rangel is still on the loose, despite Nancy’s promises to deal with his perfidy by January 2009. Why, he even accompanied Mme. Speaker and that gaggle of Congressional freeloaders (& some family members) to Copenhagen.
Geithner & Daschle paid it back (once their machinations saw the light of day) but, as quintessential modern High Liberals, are very likely looking for new ways to game the system.
Crookedness and cheating may well be integral to the Progressive Hive Mind.
Why? Is there a new Goldstone report on Tibet? Are the American people sleepless over the divided city of Nicosia? The brutal Turkish occupation of Greek Cyprus? The rough Russian annexation of Ossetia? The callous treatment of Muslims by the Chinese?
We give Israel anywhere from 3 billion to 10 billion dollars a year in cash, services and hardware, you idiot. If you can’t see why what they do is of more interest to us than Tibet, then you’re not hiding your propaganda pin well enough.
Dr. Hanson’s reference to the liberal aristocracy is spot on. Increasingly our society is returning to feudalism. The liberals do not view us as free citizens who wish to live free lives. Consider one of the chief liberal queries: how can so many of the poor and middle class vote against their economic self interest by opposing democratic proposals like single payer, and increased government spending? The liberals cannot fathom that a free citizen wants to stand on his own, not be cared for by those who think they know best.
5 Naom Sayin’.: There was an article in the WSJ, I think, back when Gates and Buffet formed their “charitable” trusts. It was written by a tax lawyer who explained the way it works very well. My recollection is that to shield their fortunes from inheritance taxation (forever) they had to form a charitable trust that neither individually controlled. This is why Gates and Buffet teamed up. Now that it is formed all they need to do is spend on charity something like 5% of their assets per year to maintain tax free status. They can likely make more then 5% by investing wisely, so the principal will likely hold steady or grow. How their heirs syphon profits I can’t recall; probably sinecures, salaries and self-dealing arrangements. It was a very good article and I’m simplifying it as best as I can recall it.
The new democrats, operating under the notion that the masses are just plain dumb, have exposed themselves and unwittingly created a hunger for plain truth that will relegate them to the wilderness for years. Examples:
- the giant lie that defies basic laws of physics that contends we can simultaneously insure 30 million more people, lower costs, and not ration healthcare all at the same time. This is not only economically, but physically impossible.
- the contention that trying enemy combatants as American citizens and closing Gitmo will make our enemies throw down their weapons and waltz willingly into the 21st century. If jihadists were worried about winning some kind of PR war, wouldn’t killing, maiming, and terrorizing thousands of their own people violate some kind of PR code of conduct? Again, I’m no Harvard grad but my common sense alarm is working overtime here.
- the confusion between stimulus and temporary stop gaps for states who were over their credit limit is as blatant a lie as has ever been propogated by a democratically elected leader. The dismal results have not halted the effort to perpetuate it, but the American people can still conclude that 2+2=4, and the longer the administration contends that 2+2=5, or 3, or whatever, the further into the wilderness they go.
I could go on and on with example after example, but the bottom line is that the truth is making a huge comeback among the non-political class and empirical evidence of results will soon overtake the supposed good intentions of the liars leading our country. I for one have watched with great enjoyment as these liars twist and turn in a briar patch of their own making.
The liberals cannot fathom that a free citizen wants to stand on his own, not be cared for by those who think they know best.
What did I hear yesterday ?
That something like 46% of Americans are “ok” with socialism?
America’s Progressives have been at this transformation for a very long time, and America’s current crop of overseers in Washington DC are loath to “power share” with their growing cadre of dependent charges.
My recommendation is that the 54% who haven’t yet taken the perp walk continue to deny the new liberal aristocracy its fantasies.
Just this month, social security took in less money than it paid out. Hold on to your hats boys and girls, this ride is going to get very bumpy. The social security “trust fund” is a myth of epic proportions.
Once the true damage caused by the government’s managing of social security receipts become known, you can anticipate much social unrest. But not to worry, Federal, State and local “workers” do not participate in the ponzi scheme….only the working stiffs.
A wise President once said, “Government is not the solution: Government is the problem.”
The government in which so many have placed their “hope”… has failed.
Nancy Pelosi and California would love to dump their 40 billion dollar massive health care bills for the illegal and non-paying masses on to our national federal debt.
Nancy plans to pass a Universal Health Care bill in Congress even if she has to go over the fence,
under the fence, or tear the fence down.
You go girl,
and give all the American people what they deserve-
Californians debt.
Maybe we could send them paper IOUs?
What Noble Lies? There isn’t a damn thing noble about them.
Al Gore noble? Give me a break. John Kerry noble? It’s beyond absurdity.
It’s a deliberate strategy to loot the country.
Look, we need to stop giving these criminals a pass and pretending that some of them have good intentions. If there is one, where is he? It’s like defending your 35 year-old, unemployed, druggie son living in your basement by saying he’s going through a phase.
Is it a coincidence that every member of Congress is wealthy beoyond compare? Is it a coicidence that about 25% of them have criminal records? Is it a coincidence that they are all addicted to lying?
It isn’t some minor political differences. It isn’t modestly divergent life philosophies. It’s war. They want to plunder the country and they want to plunder YOU. To do that, they pretend to give your money to people who have less than you do. That part’s a pittance. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is total control over your life, the peasant’s life.
And they couldn’t care less that the wealth of the country will be depleted by 90% when it’s all said it done. Stalin lived quite well, thank you very much, in a country of serfs.
# 42 SDG
Correction. Federal workers since 1983 have participated in Social Security, same as everybody else. The old Civil Service Retirement System stopped taking new enrollment that year.
SilenceDoGood: Need to check your facts; federal, state and local workers do participate in the ponzi scheme…not just the working stiffs. There were some who didn’t but time has changed that, or maybe the Congress figured in would be better to include them so that they could have more money in the fund to borrow against. It is time to look at Congress…but not as Democrats or Repubs…but as who asks for, approves or otherwise contributes to the wasteful spending currently running amok in Washington. Identify them and vote them out…but make sure your choice to replace these people are going to stop the stupidity that prevails in what should be the wisest venue in which one could work.
re: U.S. grants in support of Israel implies greater influence, interest, engagement, and impact on human suffering v. say Cyprus or Tibet.
Aid per USG: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_aid_to_Israel.gif
Hard to believe this given we make much larger grants in the aggregate to the surrounding countries. Egypt alone is over $2B a year. And I’ve not found a source suggesting more than $3B / year in grants to Israel, a significant component being our interest in supporting their resettlement of others who have been persecuted and cast out of their birth countries (resettling them in the U.S. would cost a lot more, and wouldn’t have the same quality of result in terms of socialization and education). Would that the Palestinians were as well treated as immigrants, even temporary workers, in other Muslim countries. I’ve visited with these workers and their families in the larger area and not one can hold a candle to what I’ve seen in Israel. Which strengthens my opinion that those countries are time-shifted back a couple of centuries in terms of attitudes and basic humanity. i.e. they still have what amounts to slavery, and discrimination is the rule, not an exception (and not even recognized for what it is).
This also doesn’t consider what we get back in return in terms of all the professionals they’ve schooled (better than our public schools) that have immigrated to the U.S. and are the intellectual engine, if not the creators of a significant part of our high-tech industry – along with many other superbly skilled and driven Indians, Chinese and eastern bloc immigrants. The taxes on the new wealth these expatriates have created alone far exceeds the yearly grants to Israel (that we make in our own interest, less theirs or any special interest, esp. now considering how small it is now relative to Israel’s GDP and exports – a percent or two for Israel, many times that to others in the area). Without Israel’s efforts we’d be paying a much larger economic and defense bill in the area. Would that another Arab country deserved the same level of engagement for intellectual prowess alone. Yet another example that the only true wealth is free and rewarded individual intellects, and their enterprise – by definition “free” enterprise – not centrally planned, with winners and losers picked by not the government or their cabals but voted on every day by the citizen and their pocketbook). Not resources. Not process. Not government (save at its most essential – providing for the national defense and (a blind) justice as basic infrastructure to build the rest upon).
We must, sigh, face up to realities. Human intellect has made very little progess during the past 500 years. We are still driven by the same passions,, fears, and blindness that has presisted despite MTV, the internet, and talk radio. So basically, we’re screwed. Lock and load.
Years ago I went to the Green Party’s website to read their platform. It had 12 planks and I didn’t agree with a one until I got to the last which affirmed that the seventh generation is as important as the first. I would disagree only to the extent that I think it’s even more important. It’s long been my belief that each generation is obligated to hand off a better product to the next. My Boomer generation is going to fail miserably in this regard. I can’t tell you how much that bums me out.
Mcdaniel are you as handsome as our VDH, every conservative gals fantasy. I like to read VDH and then I quickly scroll down to look for mcdaniel. Mad MAd MAd world one of my favorite films, my thirteen year old daughter has seen it a dozen or so times. Hopefully in 2012 the dems will look like the last scene in that hilarious movie, in head to toe casts lying in gurney’s
42: “Just this month, social security took in less money than it paid out. Hold on to your hats boys and girls, this ride is going to get very bumpy. The social security “trust fund” is a myth of epic proportions.”
My friend’s daughter in law worked for the SS Administration in our state’s capitol…guess what her job was?
Typing out SSI checks payable to newly arrived immigrants from Vietnam and Cambodia.
That was 30 or so years ago…by now, what with all the others who have since arrived why, U.S. taxpayers must be in the front row…how great is that?!
So the question is, what civilizations does our’s imitate and what became of them?
We’re compared to the fall of Rome but that was for different reasons than huge debt.
This can’t be new.
Every dynamic civilization faces these kinds of challenges. We are all tested sooner or later, one way or another, as individuals and as societies. Still, I am hard pressed to think of a historical precedent wherein an oligarchic group has planned and executed a deliberate, long term, incremental effort to undermine the core values of a civilization with an elaborate web of lies, with the aim of imposing oligarchy.
What have we learned?
1- It is something that free societies are particularly susceptible to, since knowledge and ideas flow freely, and people are free to assemble, organize and teach as they will. Thus an oligarchic cabal can operate more or less out in the open, pursue its goals unhindered and execute them legally. It can draw upon the latest in individual and group psychology to shape its message, and can enlist the bulk of a high-volume multi-outlet media system, and academic elite to join its cause. So, as with the fight against radical Islam, our strength (freedom) is also a weakness. But it is still more of a strength than a weakness, provided that the majority of us remain aware of this ever present danger, and learn to recognize the signals before things get critical. So teach your children well.
2- There are always those who will manipulate on a large scale in order to gain power. It is a psychological / moral defect I suppose. This should not surprise us. But what amazes me in this case is twisted nature of the deception. Al Gore is a perfect example. Who but a madman would go around the world in a permanent frenzy, warning of an imminent global cataclysm, ignoring contradictory evidence etc. All aimed at pursuing new global regulations that would funnel vast amounts of wealth into the hands of a tiny unaccountable elite? Where does the NEED to do that come from!? I truly think the guy is deranged. But the whole leftist paradigm is a maze of such deceptions (as the good Dr. has pointed out). I can understand a guy like Putin, say. An old school strong-man power broker with nationalist ambitions, but some of these Euro-American leftists are truly nuts. The lesson: Current European-American leftism is a form of madness. It’s telltales are ideological thought (exclusion of all contrary evidence, no matter how glaring) and the pathological fear of life itself (the need to control all variables, especially other humans.) I believe there is even a book on the subject called The Liberal Mind – The Psychological Cause of Political Madness, which I have not yet read but intend to. Understanding how the problem emerged is the first step in preventing its recurrence. Assuming of course that we get through the current crisis.
3- The web of PC lies seems solid. It has permeated our society at almost every level: The family, male female relations, parent child relations, religion, the arts and media, science, race relations, sexuality, history… the list goes on and on. But I have a sneaking suspicion that it is not as solid as all that. Most of us are tired of it, and not a few suspect that it is a pile of B.S. I believe that were a strong President (our leaders’ words have a lot of influence because we have invested some of our own power in him or her) were to forcefully rebut the nonsensical dogmas of left, daily, item by item, point by point – in a calm, sincere, clear, detailed and relentless manner, with painstakingly presented evidence – in person and in print, on the air and on the net, directly and in open debate – over and over nonstop… Patiently explaining how the left has used the good intent of Americans (and westerners in general) to further their own plutocratic ambitions… the foundations would crack, the mortar would crumble… and the whole facade would come crashing down.
In the end, there is nothing more powerful than the truth. People are drawn to it like a magnet because we all, deep down (except the ideologues and madmen) want to believe in something real and good. And the truth is both.
Cradle-to-grave-socialism, funded by capitalism, in a nustshell:
Welfare Blues
Capitalism aint right somehow,
but send your money, and do it right now.
You have the riches and so you should pay;
just send your money; but keep well away.
It is your duty to look after us,
so send your money, and don’t make a fuss.
We don’t want advice, and we don’t like you;
just send your money; that’s all you need do.
I was given the name James Lovelock over at the environmental blog at BBC. He is a scientist revered by the warmers.
From his pen in 1979:
“Perhaps one day the children we shall share with Gaia will peacefully co-operate with the great mammals of the ocean and use whale power to travel faster and faster in the mind, as horse power once carried us over the ground.”
Gaia A new look at life on Earth, by James Lovelock (1979) http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/gaia.htm
Great article as usual!
It reminded me of something Bill Whittle said today. It is as if we are the victim of identity theft. Someone has stolen our credit card number and is going around town charging goods and service like there’s no tomorrow. We never get anything except the credit card bills. To me, that’s our government in a nutshell.
The only thing Mad about this world is anyone who truly thinks Dems or Repubs are to blame for this mess.
America rose quickly, and is falling quickly, Not because a political party did or voted for any particular legislation, but because the entire system abrogated its responsibility to the nation and allowed its banking and tax system to be controlled by select few banking families.
Blaming Dems or Repubs certainly makes it easier, but it is the lazy fools way to avoid responsibility. The Constitution never grants rights, or freedoms or anything other than enumeration of what is worth fighting and dying for.
If its people cannot even open a book or research their own financial system to understand what is occurring, then Americans certainly deserve what is about to happen.
The United States still has a chance to extricate itself from
the looming debt nightmare. Remember , the $10 trillion in
deficit spending planned by Team Obama is just projected
spending. The money has not yet been spent. This nonsense
can still be stopped – the November elections would be a
good start.
I’m also guessing that Obama’s laziness and incompetence is
blinding him to the fact that the budgets current dramatic
shortfalls in tax revenue will be reversed if and when we
get any kind of substantial uptick in GDP. The projected
deficits are probably overstated, though Obama’s
economic ideology and Congress’s static budgeting process
blind them to that very possibility.
As bad as it is, I don’t think future Americans will be
burdened with working just to pay off the National Debt.
When the time comes, the United States will default on it’s
obligations, just like every other country in world history
has done when finding themselves in similar circumstances.
Still, that’s nothing to look forward to. Is it too early
to start shorting Chinese government bonds?
The illegal immigration problem could be solved by making living here and earning money increasingly difficult for illegals, but the government doesn’t have the will (this in not restricted to one party). For example, there are many financial services that could be restricted to citizens, permanent residents, and visa holders without much effort.
Consider France. There was a point in time where France decided all visitors would need a visa (for security reasons). We were, therefore, rather surprised when we were waved through the border after holding up US passports. But, go to a bank, and you could not cash a travelers check without that visa.
re: Debt and Deficits.
I don’t know why more Republicans aren’t willing to advocate something more than freezing the rate of increase in government spending. If the federal, state and local governments cut out half their “services” tomorrow, no one would know. At the turn of the 20th century, federal spending was below 10 percent of GDP and there were no income taxes and America was a world power. What’s wrong with that model?
Let’s pass a constitutional amendment at the federal and state levels that limits spending and taxation to a much lower percentage of the GDP.
The only way to reduce corruption in government is to reduce the money the government has to squander.
On the bright side, I guess we can be glad as Will Rogers once said that at least “We don’t have all the government we pay for.”
Ron Kean@53, very good question worthy of serious consideration. Gylappus@54 has some well thought out ideas as to historical reference point(s).
To emphasize one fact, never in our history, has communication and mobility been as pervasive and immediate. The effect of world travel, by so many, and communication media that has the world communicating, as Gylappus comments, enables freedom and embeds exceptional power for anyone to access and harness. In general, how that occurs is a function of cultural values which are expressed from everywhere on the planet.
A thread to investigate, is the impact of other such widespread innovation. Railroads, telephone, car, and others will give us a sense of what we are in the midst of now.
What does the idea of Marshal Machluhan, “the message is in the medium” tell us about the current climate?
This forum itself is new insofaras continuity, volume, participation from anyone, from almost anywhere in real time. That is unprecedented.
That said, how much impact does VDH and the follow on comments, analysis and exchange of ideas influence others? It never could have until now, in such a way, and what is the effect?
Alex@57, points out that the prerequisite for handling the current crises isn’t party affiliation, it’s the scope and insight to choose, and the decisions en masse and conclusions to lead.
More truth needs to surface about the impact of current decision makers and policy choices, or as Alex comments, the consequences will be dire and long lasting.
N.B. read and written on my iPhone – computer in a pocket. And this device is only a start to mobile capability.
78 million baby boomers are going to wake up one day and realize that the Federal, State and Local governments have stolen their retirements.
State employees will go under first.
Unless the Feds can borrow another Zillion dollars they can’t fund the cash poor/stolen money that so many states have squandered on bad investments and giving out free monies, for instance-
(Californians and Illegals, Medicare, Medicaid, SSI, free schools to teach the above how to get said free monies.)
The Feds need to put million dollar printing presses into each bankrupt state printing millions of dollars-
Money looks so much better than toilet paper and IOUs.
Oh, Dr, Hanson, holy tablet bearer, annointed philosopher scribe, visionary for the ages . . . thank you, thank you, thank you. So simple and yet so eloquent are your directives that one wonders, “Why? Why can’t the world see the world the way the world is seen by you?”
“Israel is Western.” Who can deny such crystalline insight? Not me. You’re like Sarah Palin without the boobs. “Accustomed services?” Who needs ‘em? Why give farmers subsidies when we can use that money to increase subsidies to oil companies? And Atta in Europe – INDEED!- Prague specifically, which was pretty much confirmed. (I did NOT just say that.) Debts and deficits – if only the liberals and Democrat liberals and liberal Democrats were suffering the impact of this struggling economy maybe they would understand that we have a struggling economy that is impacting people.
But only real Americans understand the real America, people like Rush and Sean and Bill – true champions of the common man, paragons of charity, Gulfstream commandos of free market principles who are showing the way to prosperity for all who will listen. I call it the Paris Principle – and it doesn’t take talent or an education, you don’t have to complete your commitments or keep your promises. All you have to do is get famous. Build your brand, just like Paris Hilton! Pretty soon YOU can pitch temper tantrums and threaten co-workers with impunity, because you’re looking out for “the folks.” That’s hot.
Video H, perhaps you should pen one of your crowd pleasers on the topic of irony – you know, like conservative icons who voted against the stimulus package who then go out and hold up big checks; or conservatives saying they vetoed the stimulus money when it was really only $28 million out of $928 million they “rejected.” Then again, that’s not irony so much as it is hypocrisy. To get a true bead on irony, let’s turn to one of the comments in this very thread:
20. misanthropicus generously offers an article of tremendous import: “Why are liberals so condescending?/ By Gerard Alexander/ Sunday, February 7, 2010. Clearly this has inspired misanthropicus to a higher consciousness, as evidenced by his evolved opinions:
- The mental ward patients took over the institution
- conservatives and other normal members of society
- the liberals’ freedom to roam, reproduce, and influence the ways of the country is clearly pernicious
Ironic? I think maybe.
baal@23,
our country will be a second-tier power like Russia within twenty years. That’s overly optimistic. Wishful thinking even. We have less than 9 months to act, before the policies being enacted by this Congress assure that fate by 2012.
Do you think we have the funds to support our military? What’ll we pay them with? Script?
We will soon have 30 million US unemployed. Extending “jobless benefits” does nothing to solve the problem. In fact it exacerbates it, because we’ll be paying with money that doesn’t exist, while dis-incentivizing job seeking.
Where will we get even 15 million new jobs?
What can we build that the world can afford to buy? It’s not like anybody else’s currency will be worth anything.
All TAX IS THEFT! Otherwise it’d be called a gift or contribution. And taxing the compassionate is what got US where we find ourselves today.
Many mischaracterize the Tea Party Movement as GOP motivated. When I attend, I find a much larger majority wanting to “throw all the b*st*rds out.” Including the b*st*rd in-chief.
John@25,
Of course not. Even in a thriving and growing global economy, absent terrorism, this level of indebtedness is lunacy. Compassion is delusion.
Jeff@29,
Did you think the turmoil to come will cause fewer illegals to seek entry? However bad it gets here in the US, it’ll be worse elsewhere. A more common sense (less compassionate) approach might be to secure the borders and only permit entry to immigrants who bring something to the party. This would have the added value of catching a few terrorists/coyotes/smugglers, et al.
Samson@31,
I’d choose Gitmo, as they’re thieves not wildcatters.
Cornhead@34,
Exactly…100 years of inculcating compassion into every aspect of US life. Legislated compassion is the worst kind, because the citizenry has no choice in the matter. It’s all about bureaucratic decisions.
illigitimate children everyhwhere Even in the White House. How compassionate.
Mike@35,
The actual saving grace of “drunken sailors” is that they pay for their own drinks.
This sea of inventive you dislike may soon turn to gunfire. Listen closely to the both sides. Don’t be fooled. Survival is not a “political” argument. When one side wishes you enslaved, then it’s not a matter to be voted on. Under those circumstances, what does compromise mean? You get to be a house slave?
At this point, the “producing” class is diametrically opposed to the “ruling” class. Our great host can provide inumerable examples from the past where “inventive” from the slaves lead to unpleasantries. See: Spartacus.
Leftist aristocracy? Let’s just call them thieves and leave out the sugar-coating.
OCB@37,
You shouldn’t write down your brain farts. It’s evidence.
Tom@38,
It’s not Leftist stupidity, it’s their plan.
The lies are merely tactics.
FeartheOnce@44,
In the not too distant past, those type payments were made with “script.”
Son #2 and his wife, in their 40′s, are excelling in a 2 year old business which is growing exponentially at the moment, (“overnight success” because they’re busting their butts with 18 hours days, their teen kids working for them FOR PAY) requiring them to lease new/larger commercial property. It was just sheer fun to hear him on a call a couple of weeks ago, laughing maniacally as he said, “You know what I am??? I’m a filthy, capitalist pig!!” We’re so proud of him, fer sure! He also explained that the guy they are leasing the new digs from owns HIS own business which manufactures large attachment stuff of some kind for big commercial trucks. The landlord never set out to be a landlord: The reason he owns this commercial property is because he needed some place to put some profits from 2008. HIS business is doing well, and he has lots of people working for him. So he’s ANOTHER capitalist pig! Statists and lefties have got to be intentionally dense when they insist that they are looking out for the little guy by destroying the hardworking middle guy. I just have trouble believing they really are that stupid, but they keep insisting they are, don’t they?
Blue-Ringed Octopus @55: you’re so right. The government doesn’t have any money. That’s why they keep taking ours.
Here’s a good start:
Gut the EPA.
Disband the AQMD
Trash the Dept. of Education.
Repeal CPSIA.
Screw the Endangered species act.
De-regulate small business.
Drill, Drill, Drill.
Build Nuclear power plants.
Prohibit electronic transfer of funds outside the US except for legitimate sales transactions, and wiring of funds to US citizens abroad.
…just for starters
JWM
“Katie Courac” – editor – ‘Couric’. No ire intended – love Pajamasmedia and VDH.
I had a history professor in college who made the claim, often, “People are complex.” Until the world is inhabited by some group other than people it will be diverse, crazy, uncomfortable, unexpected and totally unnerving. It is however the only world we have and so having a sense of the ridiculous is essential to mental health and well being.
If you can keep you head when all around you are losing theirs………….. you will never lack for entertainment. (my apologies to Mr. Kipling)
#14 Eon
“And as Orwell once said, “There are some ideas that are so stupid that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.”
Actual Orwell said: ” ..only an intellectual could believe them.” As we have seen – and Orwell saw – “intellectual” doesn’t necessarily equal “very intelligent”.
#28 Jeff Perren
“I have a somewhat less modest, but better long-term proposal: end all government welfare programs… for everyone, in every form. Once that’s done, it doesn’t matter who comes or goes (provided only that they’re investigated for contagious disease or criminal records) or what they do with their own money.
With that drain on public funds ended, it won’t matter how much money anyone sends to whom because it’s theirs to do with as they wish.”
You would also have to undo the Federal law that makes Hospitals treat anyone who comes through their doors.
And education would have to be paid to individual students via vouchers, which would make limiting those expense to actual citizens easier.
And last, but not, least the 14th Amendment needs to be “clarified” so that children born to illegals are not automatically citizens, which was never its purpose.
#33 Ozzie
“Not only that, but Bill and Melinda Gates seem to have proven themselves very particular bigots. If you look at the enrollment criteria for their scholorship foundation, you read that whites are prohibited from even submitting an application.”
So.
Where does that leave someone of mixed ancestry?
Gylippus, good post.
I think it is all about ego, ego and greed. There is a tiny percentage of humans who simply believe that they have a right to rule, and they are willing to do anything to acquire that power. Some are born with the desire (Obama), some inherit it (Gore) and some sieze the opportunity (Stalin).
300 years ago, the divine right of kings was the formulation that gave that tiny elite the priviledge of ruling with uncheckeded power. The Magna Charta began to chip away, but even as of 1775, the royalty still had unimpeachable power. Our Founders blew that away, and for over 2 centuries, the oligarchs have searched for the keys to the wonderful past. Marx, whether or not he inteded to do so, provided the best approach yet, the exploitation of class envy, and we still see the many-named “ists” using the marxist toolset to trick and fool the rubes.
As you say, with what has been learned in recent years about psychology and human motivation, they seem to be getting closer to the perfect combination of class hatred and greed, now seasoned with a touch of environmentalism and “knowledge” spoon-fed by self-proclaimed intellectuals who are insiders to the scams…..despite the unquestioned massive failures of all variations of marxism for the last 150 years.
The problem is the “stinkin’ thinkin’” of so many.
I noted during the Prez campaign, that the electoral numbers of the Blue States constantly diminishes every decade. The populace flee the Blue States, because the jobs have likewise fled before them.
They flee to the Red States to find work, but they bring their old stnkin’ thinkin’ with them. They continue to vote in the same old way. It never occurs to them that the reason they had to uproot, and leave family and friends behind, was because of how they vote.
To me, New Liberalsim is a pestilence upon the land. Like locusts, they descend, strip the land bare, then move on to other fruitful lands. Rinse and repeat. It is simply what they do.
Likewise, the illegal immigrants rail against our system. They consider their own culture superior, but never consider the reason they came here was the failure of their “superior” culture. They cannot change their stinkin’ thinkin’. They are simply incapable of it.
It seems that people are beginning to awaken to their danger. We shall see if it “too little, too late”. The locusts control the land. Will they strip the land abre before we can exterminate them. History indicates otherwise. One cannot defeat pestilence. One usually only survives it.
The tide of history is what it is. The only time it grinds not inexorably onward is when some Great Leader steps forward and interrupts History. He stands athwart Its path, and in an act of defiance and Great Will, he diverts it from its path.
I see no such Great Leader in our midst. Do you? Alas and alack!
Dr. Hanson and friends,
May I direct you to an excellent article from the Brussels Journal (The Voice of Conservatism in Europe.)
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/
Liberalism and the Search for the Ground: Another Visit with Eric Voegelin.
Thomas F. Bertonneau writes about Eric Voegelin, who in the1960s wrote that “change,” or “progress” to the liberal or radical mind actually means “destruction” of Western Enlightenment, reason, and truth as God gives us the ability to see it.
Thus, Obama’s creed appears to be “Hope and Destruction” and “Destruction we can believe in.” There is no ameliorative process.
The utopia the destructors believe in is not ever attainable because the destructors do not believe the world is God’s Creation, and that as such, it must be good, and though sorrows exist in it, sorrows must have justification at some level. In other words, accept openly the wisdom of Greek/Jewish/Christian enlightenment and its description of reality and the tragic but also beautiful nature of man.
Rather, for the destructors to succeed, they would have to be God and somehow change the nature of reality and humankind itself. Since the destructors are not God, they fail to make any utopia. They just destroy good things of enlightenment. Thus they are now politically correct totalitarians consumed in their narcissistic vanities.
Voegelin says that mature individuals maintain openness toward divine Ground, which is rooted always in truth. Deconstructors of society have false doctrines galore while we bloggers herein, by contrast, have an interest in truth, to the objectivity of which we remain open.
Cultic doctrines kill freedom. That is Obama’s horrible unspoken agenda, which he and his followers unfortunately are too blind and proud to admit.
Truth and free will — truth and freedom — by contrast require and nourish one another.
Lastly, fans of truth make no new denomination, no new institution, no new group requiring everyone’s ten percent tithe. Friends of truth usually show the error in wrong doctrine of cults of overt and covert slavery.
This era appears to be the era of consumptive hidden slavery of thought. Dr. Hanson, Bertonneau, Voegelin and the fans of this blog are now become champions of true freedom and liberty: Mutual dedication to self-restraint, i.e. the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the minds of the US Founding Fathers, the greats of Western Enlightenment: In short… we all must be now Men and Women of La Mancha!
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/
P.S. Watch “Fly Away Home” again. Our foundling culture, now consumed in feral increase, at some point will need adopted Momma Goose and Father Goose leaders to guide remaining good souls to “fly away home,” that is: back to Western Enlightenment and all good Ground.
My personal hobby has been http://www.inthatdayteachings.com, which parallels Voegelin’s thoughts, but I focus on popular Christianity. As is now broadcast, popular Christianity champions errant doctrines four: Prosperity, which grows greed; Rapture, which grows fear; Slouch, which grows supine laziness; and Emotional Hypnotism, which grows a majority which will elect as President an emotional hypnotizer, i.e. it grows blindness. The solution is to abandon all lying doctrines and get back to elevated forms of orthodoxy.
Our dear Christian broadcasters do not like my message, nor do liberals like Voegelin’s or Hanson’s. But the majority of blind Christians who voted for Obama have to see what’s wrong with their own selves. Ditto for the media. Ditto for the education system. Ditto for the excesses of our banksters and politicians.
What I am saying is that there is a large pattern to discern. Where Western Enlightened thinking is… there is self-correction, openness to reality and reality’s constraints, an absence of fear and hate and hostility, and a presence of love, divine love as shown in the Ancient Mariner, as shown by Scrooge post-specters, as shown by Our Founding Fathers…. but noticeably absent from destructors, er liberals, er the Obama-body-snatched and our inestimable President Obama.
God have mercy on us all!
America’s Progressives have been at this transformation for a very long time, and America’s current crop of overseers in Washington DC are loath to “power share” with their growing cadre of dependent charges.
Think again retard. It probably has something to do with the fact that “socialist” France and Germany already pulled out of their recession. Who writes this crap for you?
Oh, I see. If white males are interested in governance, that’s a bad thing:
State redistricting effort is out of the backroom but not free of politics — Ethnic groups say the pool of applicants for a citizen commission to redraw Assembly and Senate districts is too white and too male to reflect the state’s diversity. Others question the expense. Shane Goldmacher in the Los Angeles Times — 2/4/10
KDW@59, with respect to deficit estimates, according to economists and financial pundits that have been appearing on Squakbox with Joe Kernan & co. / CNBC, the consensus is the estimates are very optimistic for revenues to recover at an unlikely rate.
In other words, unless GDP sees very healthy growth, expect higher than government advertised deficits – starting this year.
That or hope that deficits and spending become a hot election issue to temper the publid cash outflows.
sheezstiks@64 – more invective and character attacks – and you continue to about yourself.
When your perspective changes, I’m sure your life will improve.
Not enough people have seen this reality coming and as you have observed good Doctor is already here. The trumpet needs to blow a lot louder than it has or the crisis will soon be a tragedy that can’t be stopped.
When the government checks stop showing up in mail boxes in our cities. Who knows what will happen except these people will be manipulated by fools and will panic.
We can’t do enough to sound the alarm but we can try. We can also prepare ourselves to help our neighbors for it is better to be living beside a trusted friend than a desperate angry man with nowhere to turn.
Sound the alarm again and again.
There are two types of immigrants. Traditonally, the overwhelming amount were the good-hearted free spirits who recognized the shortcomings of their native land, not only in economic opportunity, but in national character (perhaps influenced by the former, but also causing it).
The societies these immigrants flee have mores conditioned by a malignant political climate that, by punishing the succesful individual who managed to rise above the intentionally oppressed norm of mandated egalitarianism which created heavy strains of secretiveness, gossip, distrust, envy, and reporting on one’s neighbor running through a Soviet urban neighborhood, or even through a Balkan village a few generations removed from centuries of Ottomanism, making not only individual economic freedom very difficult to acquire (without being a member of the ruling class), but even recreational socializing often a miserable thing to endure (with true friends few and far between).
And those kinds of immigrants are not only very grateful Americans, but also very patriotic and assimilate well. Some Americanize their names, marry Americans, and don’t even bother passing on their heritage to their offspring. Others–and most, I would guess–try to preserve the best parts of their heritage, and stay involved in the shared ethnic aspects of their community, but still very grateful, and proud, to be Americans, fully aware of the words of the pledge they took, and honoring their sacred oath.
But over time, the very freedom that drew the disillusioned and dispossessed and the truly best and brightest from all over the world to come here also brought the very statists they fled from to come here and–with self-righteous smugness– set up shop.
It wasn’t their own countries’ deficiencies–political, economic, or cultural–that were to blame for the exoduses, but America’s racist, sexist, corporatist, militarist, and fascist imperialism which had caused the other nations of the world’s deficiencies to begin with.
Some of those anti-American Americans even say that the predominant whiteness and monotheistic Christianity of the United States is the *causus causata* of the misery.
Anyway, America’s (hitherto) excellent standard of living and freedoms are just incidentals that really have nothing to do with the culture–or its Constitution– that is maligned as described. In fact, it’s all built on the backs of 17th-19th Century slaves and 20th-21st Century illegal aliens, anyhow, with women used as incubating machines for The Man to perpetuate the malignities.
Or something like that. Whatever it is, they just don’t like America, and with no apologies use the very freedom America–and only America–gives them to work for its destruction (or at the very least its comeuppance).
I have a concern, and maybe someone here can give me an answer, here it is:
From the likes of the Gores, Kerrys, Edwards and Kennedys of this world I could expect much nonsense and arrogance; these are after all ill earned, inherited, or looted fortunes (I say “looted,” for calling a name to such things as earning millions by suing doctors).
Where I have a problem is with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. These are people I still admire deeply, they went against many obstacles to build their fortunes in an honest, and very capitalistic, way. Why they speak now in favor of the things they had to fight against on their way up?
Gates and Buffet have protected their fortunes from being inherited by the federal government, why then they want the government to inherit mine? Buffet, for instance, is very effective in protecting his income from federal taxes, then why he speaks in favor of having others pay more taxes? Why has Buffet supported mayor government intervention in the economy, shouldn’t be this the last thing a hard working businessman would want? Why was he so strongly supporting Bernanke’s confirmation, as if the future on the nation depended only on that man alone?
Any reasonable answers? or should I just ask: Who is John Galt?
62. D.S. – Thanks for your interesting comments. Earlier last century Hannah Arhendt and others commented on ‘Totalitarianism’ being predicated on industrialization and advanced technology. The more people come to rely on technology to get through their daily lives, the more people are controllable by those who control the technology. It’s actually an old problem, going back to the ‘Hydraulic Despotisms’ of Bronze-Age Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan and China. The history of human civilization is an elastic. It tends to want to resume the shape it was made in.
It was the Greeks who through some seemingly miraculous innovation broke the mold, and formed advanced societies where power was broadly based among a relatively free citizenry. We are their heirs. But it is an especially fragile model for the reasons I tried to outline in my previous post. The Athenians also fell victim to ideological infighting for power during the time of the Pelopponesian War, though I find it hard to tell if one side was deliberately trying to subvert the democracy in quite the same way as the Dems are today in the U.S. Perhaps the good Dr. has some thoughts on this?
So technology (and other specialized knowledge with significant economic value) has always been a potential trap for the individual, as well as an enabler (contradictions are everywhere!) Today however, the technology is very information rich. That is to say that we are all leaving electronic traces (the Long Tail) everywhere. And so our consumption needs / habits can be tracked. If government can centralize that knowledge (including our political leanings), they will have near total control over us. They can isolate and destroy you if they think you are a political threat. It is a new form of uber-totalitarianism which does not bode well for the future of mankind. Thus two very different kinds of possible futures lie before us, and one of them is very dark. That is what I find to be the most disturbing thing about the direction that Obama is pushing the nation, and the role of government. They want to establish control over how we think. It is indeed very Orwellian, and that is ultimately what this fight is about.
73. Proreason. Thanks for your thoughts on this subject. I find it intriguing also…
“I think it is all about ego, ego and greed.”
No doubt those are factors. But I know many people with strong egos and / or high ambitions who aren’t as obsessed with destroying all who think differently like Gore is, or gaining universal power. There is something extra (or lacking) in people like him. There is a certain humorless-ness with which he goes about his business. He doesn’t seem to connect with other people, rather sees us all as vaguely threatening automatons who must be forced into a mold of his making.
Hitler had some of those same qualities, but not Mussolini. The Mussolini types are dangerous but responsive, the Gore types can turn monstrous because they cannot feel anything outside themselves… weird. At any rate, I think it’s important to become sensitized to this personality type. There are behavioral patterns which can be recognized that reveal that, beneath the seemingly polished and articulate facade, you may be dealing with a psychopath. And there are a number like that in Obama’s entourage.
“300 years ago, the divine right of kings was the formulation that gave that tiny elite the priviledge of ruling with uncheckeded power… “
I totally agree that Marxism is an unconscious quest to restore feudalism, at least in its initial stages.
But it goes beyond that too. European Feudalism was actually, for the most part, a fairly free-wheeling system compared to the earliest and most enduring forms of human civilization – the “chiliarchies” of the late Neolithic and Bronze age. My own sense is that is where Marx (and his ilk) unconsciously wants us to go. A place where every single individual is literally part of a unified system of behavior and belief, with a single individual ego (embodying the godhead) sitting at the very top. That is invariably where the collectivist impulse leads, given enough time: A throwback to pre-Biblical epochs where individuals had no destiny beyond that of a cog.
Add to that a desire to close all doors on the future. To ‘freeze’ change forever, so that no-one can ever break out of the mold again, or create something new (which would threaten the perfection of egalitarian unity.) It is, at its root, a denial of the chaotic, creative/destructive nature of human life, and thus of life itself.
This is of course all very abstract, but you can see it in the policies of The One which can be summarized as.: Level society, control citizens, limit future options.
The Rapture is not an errant doctrine; it is the Resurrection of the Just, which is something that no one can be saved without believing in, for to deny the Resurrection of the Just is to deny the Resurrection of Christ, outside of which, there is no salvation. As for the fear it causes, the only fear that teaching the Rapture induces is the healthy fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom. And if we have cause to fear the Wrath of God to be poured out during the Tribulation, how much more should we fear His Eternal Wrath, inflicted forever in the Lake of Fire?
Victor,
Another masterpiece. These are the narratives that no liberal can deny and only deflect with appeals to emotion or by changing the subject.
WELL DONE.
So… is the snow storm also Nemesis?