Bailouts Spoil Your Apex
Aug 11, 2010 Current Events, Topical
Turn on any TV show that has some interaction with public sector employed characters and you will get a narrative of shrinking public sector budgets leading to financially strangled public sector employees. Two episodes in a row of the SyFy show “Warehouse 13″ have characters employed in the public sector who bring up budget cutbacks. This TV show is not unusual in this depiction as it is very common to hear the narrative.
Specifically in the world of public education, media narratives of financially smitten educators abound. Congress comes back from recess for emergency funding to support the budgets of locally run districts. The president gives speech after speech with backdrops of teachers in an effort to get wide support for the plight of the starved teachers.
Many states and school districts have managed their affairs into the toilet. As a result of that and the economic environment, money for the public schools is said to be tight. You and I can, through our local school boards, attempt to fix our local problems, but we cannot effect one bit the decisions of some far off locally run education system. Yet, the argument from the president and other socialists is that we must pay for those far off districts and boards none the less.
Obama says that our kids will not get the education that they desperately need, because the sainted teachers will not have the money to come back and teach this year. Our kids will suffer without an education. In the spirit of this gushers and bailouts presidency and congress, we must give whatever our hopes are for our money to pay for the aims and designs on our money for the teachers and their unions. This is nothing but another bailout for those communities that have screwed themselves over with bad management on the backs of those who haven’t.
What is the point?
The national debt, contributed to by this bailout mentality is climbing and climbing. The deficit is rising. The private sector is shrinking. The government mentality is to consume and consume the surplus and non-surplus of the private sector and put off the payment to an undefined later date. Well who is going to pay later?
The debt and deficit will be reconciled by higher taxes and inflated-away savings values. Those are the only two ways this can be resolved. Unless there is an epidemic that kills off the current working generations, the current working generations will pay in shrunken retirements and shrunken pay before they retire. Still, they are not the only ones that will have to pay. The ones that will supposedly suffer by the lack of teachers are the ones who will pay later for debt today.
Anyone who has lived in a country with runaway inflation can tell you of the value of an education in such an environment. Yes, you may have a slightly larger edge over those who don’t have an education, but it is an edge that makes you king of the trash heap. Education in a hyper-inflation environment has very little effect on your ability to raise yourself out of poverty. There are no examples in history where people in mass could do anything but leave their country or revolt to change their personal situations in mass when presented with such a circumstance.
So, again, what’s the point? If bailouts like the current one for local education lead to monetary collapse, one cannot raise by any means himself from such a collapse, what is the point of having an education payed for by bailouts?
Imagine that social mobility from incapable and poor to capable and well off is an old-time water wheel. As new water runs down stream past the paddles, the wheel turns. The part of the wheel that was under water is soon the part at the apex of the rotation. When there is freedom in the system, with a stable currency and manageable expenses, each part of the wheel can one day be at its own apex.
The American dream is that from even underwater means, one can rise to his or her own apex. We can be successful with that talent and hard work with which we have been blessed to possess or perform. That mobility it provided by a system with freedom in the rotation of the shaft on which our wheel turns.
When hyper-inflation kicks in, runaway taxation ensues, and the other burdens caused by the bailout mindset become evident, the rotation of our water wheel stops as though a tree branch is thrust in the spokes or the bearings have seized up. No amount of running water can push the wheel. You can work hard, you can work smart, you can educate yourself, but nothing pushes your wheel. You remain underwater. Underwater becomes your apex.
So, what is the point of bailing out education systems that will educate for a future where education does nothing to push your wheel? We might as well all be illiterate in the rice fields.
Tags: American Dream, Bailouts, Congress, Education, Inflation, Obama, Social Mobility
Marxism in America: A House Divided
The above is a fairly lengthy but enlightening, uplifting, edifying speech by Clarence Thomas on the subject Lincoln, jurist prudence, and slavery.
In this speech Justice Thomas talks about Lincoln’s famous rebuttal of the support of the Kansas-Nebraska act extending slavery to the Louisiana purchase territories. Many people think that Lincoln used the phrase “House divided” in reference to the civil war, but it was well before the civil war and even before he was president.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing or all the other.
Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new–North as well as South.
The battle against slavery that had begun in the very beginning of the federation during the constitutional debates, culminated in the civil war. Then after the civil war, the quest for equal civil rights based on rights culminated in the civil rights movement. In each case, the journey to equalize the house divided took 80 to 100 years.
In the 20th century, the Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR administrations began to divide the house again. We will either become fully socialist as it was called by the progressives of the Wilson era or we will re-liberalize our individual sovereignty back from the state and be fully the nation that we fought for in the revolutionary war.
I fear that Lincoln’s words are prescient for our time as well. On the issue of Marxism in America “I do not expect the Union to be dissolved–I do not expect the house to fall–but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”
Tags: Classical Liberalism, History, Marxism, Slavery, Socialism
Pacifism and Scorn
Feb 1, 2010 Topical
Pacifism, by its proper label, is very often an undesirable name. Because it has not been redefined like many of the modern redefined old terms have been, the label of pacifist will be denied by most people who can be defined with no other word. Hilaire Belloc, in his typical fashion of single article poetry, forever explained the absurdity of pacifism in his poem, “The Pacifist”:
Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight,
But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.
With such a blunt and precise excoriation, a pacifist must continue to redefine his or herself by other terms. The modern pacifist goes to great lengths to tie his pacifism to religion, political affiliation, intellectual pursuit, or a myriad of other other disguises. Pacifists express many different motivations all covered by an assumption of moral exaltation. Sometimes a pacifist is so because he has interpreted religious text to demand such a position. A pacifist may have had some experience with his own violent tendencies that have caused him to shy away from violence like an alcoholic from Oktoberfest. Perhaps the pacifist is simply a cowardly person who justifies his cowardice with a pacifist philosophy. Still, few dare call it pacifism. It is always some other name.
You will see a person arguing a very pacifist point-of-view in a television debate and take great care to state, “Now listen, I am no pacifist.” This is usually said after the individual has gone on and on about how one must under no circumstances seek military intervention, private gun ownership, capital punishment for the worst offenders, and so on and on. They don’t want the label, but they want the position because it just feels good.
Pacifists generally are people who don’t define themselves in any way. They often people who feel their ways through life. They don’t think beyond the first stage: If I decline to fight, then what? They never answer the “then what?” question. They just want to feel good about how they refuse to hurt someone else.
A pacifist will admit the necessity of some past conflict by which their timidity to hold positions could not be offended. They will refer to a war that popular culture has accepted was necessary, but they will not do so in any other way than 20/20 hindsight. They do not ever put themselves in the shoes of those who knew at the time that some action needed to be taken. They are pacifists by whatever motivation who relent under the strain of undeniable peer pressure.
This need to justify a pacifist position, however, does much to muddy the water. In a need to deny the term of pacifist, the pacifist will align him or herself with groups who promise pacifist goals, but are usually far from aligned with pacifism. A communist American in the 1950s may have demanded peace, but hoped for communism’s success. An anti-Semite might have called for talks with 1930s German leaders, but just really liked what those guys were saying about Jews. A slave-owner might have spoken of anti-aggression, but really he wanted to retain ownership of his slaves.
This alliance of non-pacifists with pacifists through deceptive rhetoric permeates our contemporary society. Presidential candidates will bloviate on and on about how the oppose war and then pass laws to take property by force of law. They will support dictators abroad, confiscation at home, and generally pursue aggressive action that is far from pacifistic. Since no politician or official will accept the label of pacifist based on rhetoric, the actions never have to be pacifist. They can’t be called a hypocrite, because they accepted no definition for their dogma. It’s just beneficial that their words appealed to the pacifist who padded their victory margins to power.
Illiberalism and Permissivism
One of the greatest fallacies of the modern era is to use the term of Liberalism to label those whom we call liberal today. I think that we do this, because they themselves claim the appellation of liberal and we simply concede the use. Those on the other side of issues from “liberals” often convert the term to a pejorative to diminish its positive impact. The loss of this term in its original and historic use within the American tradition has been a loss of understanding of the American Ideal of true classical liberalism.
In the classical sense, Liberalism is the rejection of sovereignty in the state in favor of the concept of individual sovereignty in the people. Up until the liberal period in western society, sovereignty was usually vested in a monarch, parliament, or some other state entity. All individuals within the dominion of the sovereign were nothing more than subjects of the sovereign. Their own natural sovereignty was not recognized or granted to them by the sovereign of the state.
Many philosophers and political thinkers began prior to the liberal era to theorize and later declare that all people were born sovereign and that their sovereignty had been commandeered by those in whom state power was then vested. This radical idea was treasonous in many nations and was only theoretical until a state would arise that would challenge the old notions of vested power. The moment that allowed the theory of liberalism to become practice arrived in an attempt of colonists subject to a distant power to retain liberty that had only been obtained by accident on the part of the host state.
The British crown at the time of the American revolution may have been under the authority of a liberal constitution established in the Cromwell rebellion, but it never gave the people living in the homeland of the empire the kind of individual sovereignty that the colonists enjoyed only through the inability of the crown to restrict them across the Atlantic. When the restrictive power of the crown increased through the expansive influence and power of the growing British empire, the American colonists would not concede the liberty they came to appreciate was theirs.
The declaration of independence and later the constitution named a liberty that had already been part of the American tradition. Subsequent movements of abolitionism of slavery and reconciliation with the native populations with time bore fruit. The journey had been hard and bloody.
Growing along side the expansion of true classical liberalism, modern “liberalism” also grew. It has always been mislabeled, because it has nothing to do with the liberation of individual sovereignty. In fact, the liberal acceptance and experimentation of anything counter to normative culture often pursues expansion of the state in its favor. One can see that liberals so called are neither liberal nor open-minded. They are only counter-cultural and permissive of anything counter-cultural. They are illiberal.
Illiberalism, if further named could be called permissivism. Permissivism is a term that must be used, because it explains it all. If you would like to permit abortion, the left is your ally. Want to have gay marriage, the left is your ally. Activist courts, Czars instead constitutionally reviewed cabinet members, money confiscated from one citizen to give to another, expansive administrative bureaucracies bound by no one and no constitution, indoctrination in schools, state-sponsered healthcare, and on and on. The ideology of permitting anything as long as it is new, expansive, and will solidify your life statement of not being like your parents is the leftist’s ideology.
When Mussolini first became an international political figure, he was celebrated for his new ideas. Socialism was stale and unworkable to many leftists. After all, the government must take over all industry for it to work. The political and logistical implications of such an implementation were seen by many un-constrained permissives as impossible or at least improbably executable. Mussolini’s idea of simply regulating businesses into large corporate entities that would be easier to infiltrate, influence, or bully was so much more practical.
Mussolini himself was a died-in-wool socialist from birth getting even his given name, Benito, from the mexican socialist revolutionary Benito Juarez. Benito Mussolini was lionized in American and western culture for brief time as his ideas were fresh and had not yet been carried to their only conclusions. It was the permissives that called themselves progressives that simply loved these new and unusual ideas.
Tags: Classical Liberalism, Consitution, History, Liberty