There was once a time when the lower ranks of society would admire the upper ranks, and work hard, however ineffectually, to acquire the habits and virtues of the upper classes on a journey of personal betterment. There was once a time when the upper ranks understood their duty to the lower ranks, and constrained themselves publicly in an act of noblesse oblige, to serve as example for their lessers. Today, that dynamic is destroyed. The losers know they’re losers, but they no longer give a shit. They wallow in their wretchedness like pigs in mud, sticking a porky hoof up the pinched sphincter of anyone who would encourage them otherwise. The winners know they’re winners, and despite their tissue-thin rhetoric to the contrary, know that it wasn’t hard work but the luck of the DNA draw that they aren’t rolling around in the sty with the pigs and who, if you get them behind closed doors and pry liberally with single malt scotch, secretly believe the left hand side of the bell curve barely even qualifies as members of the same human species. So now we have two groups, staring distantly at each other across the tar pit of our shredded national identity known as pop culture, who don’t give a shit about the other, and are feverishly living their lives to guarantee that a shit will never have to be given.
If you think this is sustainable, you have only to sense the bubbling resentment surfacing not only in the urban jungle where resentment is the engine of self-delusion, but in once placid regions like small towns and college campuses, to know it is not. Soon, there will not be enough gated land behind which the elites can barricade themselves and continue peddling their hypocritical pissant platitudes. The orc hordes will swarm like locusts and devour everything in their path. Even the danegeld will lose its power to pacify, if for no other reason than that the source of funds will not keep up with the hungry multiplying maws of the beasts of chaos. If you feed it, they will come.
The fact is that the way issues are debated in our national political debates very rarely actually takes the future into account. What’s better, to protect teachers’ jobs or to give kids a good education? What’s better, to avoid a recession today or to avoid inflation tomorrow? We seem to prefer instant to delayed gratification – how, well, childish, ain’t it? This situation exists largely because those who have the biggest stake in the future have no say.
I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken
We are at an economic dead-end and those in power are in denial. The truth is our economic problems are due to loose monetary policy, central economic planning, and the parasitic expenses of government.
The current economic strategy is right out of "Atlas Shrugged": The more incompetent you are in business, the more handouts the politicians will bestow on you. That's the justification for the $2 trillion of subsidies doled out already to keep afloat distressed insurance companies, banks, Wall Street investment houses, and auto companies -- while standing next in line for their share of the booty are real-estate developers, the steel industry, chemical companies, airlines, ethanol producers, construction firms and even catfish farmers. With each successive bailout to "calm the markets," another trillion of national wealth is subsequently lost. Yet, as "Atlas" grimly foretold, we now treat the incompetent who wreck their companies as victims, while those resourceful business owners who manage to make a profit are portrayed as recipients of illegitimate "windfalls."
How long 'til analysts start touting canned goods and ammunition?
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