My views on the past election are simple and clear, or so I hope. Taken from my commentary at Hot Air:
The next four years has a set of problems that remain unchanged, and they are due to a century of turning away from a fiscally responsible course and never working to pull back programs and hold institutions accountable for what they do. This does not change in 2 years of a Tea Party.
The ‘fiscal cliff’ of higher taxes, unsustainable debt, and the resulting low investment into the economy which gives lower jobs cannot be avoided no matter who is in office. Over-regulation of society and institutions by government was always going to be a hard job and will be harder because of who is elected, but the problem, itself, remains. The lowered productivity is a result of this, as well as an increasing cost to everything as central management fails as it has done since the beginning of time and only absolute poverty of thought and pocket have allowed such conditions to spiral into Iron Times.
As a Nation we see insolvent States about to go belly-up: CA, IL, NY to name but three. Yet Obama winning does not detract from the fact that at the State level the movement is away from ‘just accepting’ dictation from above. With 30 States with Governors who do not necessarily follow the federal government’s lead and Statehouses tasked with survival of their States likewise aligned, the coming problems of a few States going insolvent will point out that the Constitution is not a suicide pact: no State is ‘too big to fail’. That decision isn’t made at the federal level, but the State level and when the good and thrifty States put forth that their people did not vote for pensions in CA, IL, NY and elsewhere, then the second level of accountability comes into play along with its checks and balances.
These things were on the agenda no matter who won last night, and the American people are not giving a solid message but one that is nuanced with an innate understanding of what federalism is, even if it is not talked about. The fight now moves from the failed National institutions to the State and local level just where so many have said it would be and should be since the rise of the Tea Party. In that realm is the hardest fight for those who would correct the problems of society as the federal government will no longer be able or ready to help as it becomes insolvent in its own right. We will have a devalued currency, soaring prices for everything, and a bankrupt educational system from K-12 through to the University level that cannot be sustained and will, due to its own weight, collapse as it has already started to do.
Hard times are ahead and they always were. Mitt Romney promised to put pressure on the wound to at least allow it to clot up and perhaps limp along until something a bit better could be done. Now comes the next path, the harder path, the unpleasant path, the painful path and as we see our Nation devolve at the federal level it is up to the States to bring it back in line. We have grown overly fond of the 20th century Nation State and yet, driven by 19th century dogma against eternal 18th century understandings, it is up to us in the 21st century to apply the thing that is left to us: cauterize the wound. Our fellow citizens won’t want to face that now, but when they are slapped silly by having to pay for what others have promised and cannot deliver, when what they have been promised cannot be delivered, when their straits grow so dire because of unwise governmental choices then what other end is there?
Hold the Left to their lovely promises and continually ask how they can pay for it without killing people. Because medical rationing is the State deciding who should die and when – it is killing people via the element of the State. Taking from the rich does not make the poor wealthy as the economy declines, and that, too is the State deciding winners and losers and extending and deepening poverty for all which will kill those at the lowest part of society. This is the mirror that now must be held up to the gloating, smirking, finger-pointing, condescending Left and point to the blood on their hands and pooling around their feet. If all their lovely ideas are so grand, then why is such misery required and such impoverishment guaranteed? For this does not work out no matter when it was tried or by whom: it cannot be done ‘right’ because of the required misery that none on the Left dare to acknowledge and always decry as ‘someone else’s fault’ never their own.
That is your job: educate those who will listen, warn those who can hear, work with your fellow man to insure his safety, point out that the ills of the many are not solved by making the few worse off and killing the old, the poor, the young and the enfeebled. Help the educational system to implode and be prepared to take its place in your neighborhood so that the young can learn of our folly and that of their grand-parents and great-grandparents. Be an example to others, lead a good life, uphold your ideals, and prepare as many as you can for what comes next for it will be awful in ways we cannot conceive. Winning an election is not the same as surviving the victory, and an election is not a war but a battle.
As Breitbart said, we are at WAR.
I’ve been preparing for the long haul no matter who wins or loses a battle.
Have you?
ajacksonian on November 7, 2012 at 9:10 AM
What institutions are about to fail?
- Medicare and Medicaid, the M&Ms, aided and abetted by Obamacare. These are no longer vital and insolvent and show the folly of government trying to figure out medicine and, with Obamacare, just decide who lives and who dies. Just like with cronies in business, the government seeks to make newborns a crony to the ruling government via having to thank it for being allowed to live. Yet this is fiscally and morally irresponsible, and those two go hand-in-hand. And these hands drip with blood.
- Social Security is in the red and after a few years of getting paid off with inflated dollars in their bonds, it will soon be insolvent. The government has attempted to set a retirement age while demographics has been pushing the upper limit of human healthy old age for decades. Luckily with the Obamacare death panels, government might try to make SSA solvent by killing the old, the sick, the infirm. That will be YOU because ideology and politics will be involved, and getting SSA will soon get not means tested but compliance tested as this is how tyrants secure power to their government.
- Education – As a 13th century institution it has run its course, and has varied from the best route of teaching one how to think and replaced it with rote learning. The first gets you a vibrant and constantly questioning citizenry, while the latter gets you a compliant one. Yet to perform this there must be more bureaucrats than educators, more overburden and less to sustain it, which causes the institution to become brittle, frail, and to implode due to the move to sustain ever growing revenue to ever more bureaucrats, and far less capable teachers who can no longer think on their feet. This one is coming hard and fast at the post-secondary level, but even at the lowest level these institutions have been crumbling and no amount of money will sustain them.
- Banking at the National Scale has enabled and empowered deficit spending which can only be paid for by one of two routes: inflation of the currency to pay off past debt in devalued currency, meaning you are deprived of wealth as more money is in circulation without work to back it, or, high interest rates so that excess currency can be removed from circulation which lowers the tax base by having people paid less in more valuable currency and the taxes set up for a low valuation currency cannot adjust downwards fast enough to cover the delta. With lowered tax revenue there is a call to increase taxation, but what does one do when the hard and fast poverty line is numerated in inflated currency? Taxing the new 'poor' doesn't sell and the old 'rich' are paying less because of a stronger currency as well. Neither of these will make the bankers to be nice people, and for not doing their duty a decade and more ago of taking the punch bowl away when the party was starting to roar, we will find ourselves truly questioning why we have a National Banking System known as the Federal Reserve as they will be shown to be clear currency manipulators doing the bidding of spendthrift politicians.
- Insolvent States – 'Too big to fail' will be attempted to apply to States like CA, IL, NY and any others that have over-obligated their tax base to pensions and pay-offs to retirees. This now drives the debt burden up to these States to the point they cannot be sustained. The States, as signatories to the US Constitution, do have the power to negate and change contracts, to put forward that contracts done with ill intention or just absent-mindedness can be dissolved. The other States will be pointing this out to those insolvent States and that the power to re-organize is well within the legislative process inside the States. Other States will refuse to accept the burden of 'too bit to fail' for other States and point out that THEIR taxpayers had no say in the debt incurred and obligated by States they DO NOT LIVE IN. This will not 'break' the Union, but put up the mirror that it is upon those who obligate such debt to deal with it.
Then there is the backdrop to all of this on the Global level as crony systems fail and become insolvent globally. The EU is unlikely to last out another decade and it may only have months to live at this point. Unless you want to see Germany put in charge of it, which would be the equivalent of winning WWII and losing it a generation later. Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and now France all teeter on the brink of chaos due to Left politics and social policies that can't be sustained by anyone, not even Germany. Germany might be able to cushion a collapse of that international monstrosity, but it will not be tied to it as their people did not agree to the debt incurred by other European Nations. See how that works? It is a mirror of America a few months ahead of us at this point.
China has spent capital and wealth for cities none can afford to live in and impoverished their people and inflated their currency by stealth. Already the rumblings of problems from east to west, from polluted and failing industrial provinces to the rise of radical Islam are hammering at that Nation. Communism has failed. Corrupt and crony National Socialism has failed which is what China moved to in the post-Mao world. China has been used to bloody solutions in the past but never had a population educated enough to actually formulate resistance to it. For the first time ever in Chinese history its government will have to face an industrialized Nation being impoverished that is just educated enough to know what is being done to it and with 21st century electronic and social media tools to talk with each other about their plight. When all of the Western debt holding move to lower value either via Nation State insolvency or inflation (or both) China's economy will implode and has already started that in seeing low cost labor jobs moving via Chinese companies outside of China. China is not the last bastion of cheap labor: SE Asia and Africa are and now China will reap what it has sown.
India has grown by leaps and bounds, yet its infrastructure has not followed suit and its ability to uplift the poor has only incrementally improved. With global problems comes threats to the modern infrastructure of electricity, sewage conditioning and potable water (where they are available). Technologically India has taken vast strides in the late 20th century with the fall of the USSR and having never fully vested in its backwards economic system, India has allowed areas for growth internally. Yet those, too, rely on debt and foreign sources for materials and finished goods, along with food. Unrest due to lack of food has hit not just India but other Nations as well, particularly in the Middle East and Africa, and these will only grow as Western food sources decline in productivity due to backwards government spending.
The Middle East is in the midst of upheaval due to Radical Islam and broken, crony infrastructure that is used to repress peoples. The elements of Radical Islam do not have any modern notion of economics and will cause further strife, chaos, disorder and starvation in their wake. Starving masses usually don't provide for competent military machines, however, and utilizing jihadi self-destructive violence only makes problems worse for those Nations supplying such as productive and young individuals are removed from the workforce. The human bomb of demographic domination is built on a house of cards sustained by Western agriculture and productivity, and once those disappear the problem becomes a demographic one internally to those Nations of the 'Arab Spring'. North Africa will export foment and jihadism, yes, and the population crash will redouble the devastation upon that weary continent.
In the sub-Saharan southern Africa there are few good and viable Nations outside of South Africa, and even there social turmoil due to ethnic strife is not unknown. If South Africa cannot assure its food supply then the problems about to beset the rest of the sub-Saharan region will come its way as well. Outside of South Africa things are not so bright and the list of Nations undergoing social strife, ethnic cleansing, kleptocratic governments, and all with a backdrop of AIDS removing most of a generation is sobering. It may well be that only the morally and socially upright populations and sub-populations survive to any great extent in 50 years due to the horror besetting their part of the world.
S. America is only meta-stable due to resource industries, which will collapse once Europe and North America no longer have industrial capacity nor demand to utilize them. Nor will China in recession going far beyond anything we know as modern recession, be able to sustain internal demand (by building cities) to keep industries going. Without industrialization spread deeply into S. America the opportunity to create vibrant economies is limited. Chavez has pointed out that the end of socialist doctrines is internal lack of productive capacity and that indenturing people to the State (even if it is competently run) means lowering of living standards for all, not just the rich. Argentina has had cash problems for more than a decade and its currency is suspect. Brazil's crony socialism is about to see the end of ready cash flow, which means that without heavy industry and shifting away from agriculture, the Nation will be at extreme peril for internal problems.
Mexico had unwisely signed on to NAFTA, which exposed its backwards agrarian sector to the modernized US agribusiness. Rural Mexico was deeply harmed as young men moved north to find jobs (first in transplanted US production facilities and, later, as illegal migrants seeking work) now find that those jobs are gone. Organized crime and the foreign jihadi element helping the criminals now seeps into Mexico via standard means of corruption and through outright murder, often on a scale that dwarfs current wars. Mexico had signed on to 'Green' ideas and limited marginal expansion of oil and natural gas, meaning that it is now bereft of those sectors to sustain the economy. Mexico used to be able to feed its own people (albeit poorly) prior to NAFTA, and now that form of agriculture has been decimated by 20 years of NAFTA and those skills and knowledge of local farming, once lost, will not come back easily if at all.
Australia has been a relative bright spot for the world outside of Israel, as it had started to undo some of its socialist policies on retirement and put a relative amount of freedom back into the hands of its people. Agriculture has done well in Australia and it is serving as the supplemental breadbasket of the world. The internal problems of Australia are unique to it, including jihadists exporting problems to its shores. As the British Commonwealth falters, it is Australia and Canada that will become those places trying to repeal the most onerous and financially lethal government policies the fastest. The rest of the Anglo-sphere had best take note of this as these two Nations have resources, arable land, water, and relatively high productive capacity for the near term. Longer term issues of global market collapse will hit these Nations, as well, but they will be able to weather these storms by having their people understand that the problems of government trying to control their economies (and their very lives) is the cause of the world's problems, not its solution. Both Nations have had backwards laws on firearms and preservation of freedom, but nothing like Great Britain itself now has.
That these problems were all known before the election is troubling. That the American people have not factored them into the Nation State federal government is more troubling, still. Yet the US wellspring of revitalization starts at the bottom, not the top, which is why so many States moving to get responsible and responsive governments in place is heartening. As the States are signatories to the US Constitution after in-State ratification by the people, it is these set of governments that hold the major key to renewal along with the people of the Nation as a whole. If the socialist movements of the 20th century was to put more power into the hands of Nation State governments, America holds the card of that Nation State actually being formulated by the States and must serve all of their needs, not just any one of them or collection of them. America was instituted on the self-evident observation that governments are instituted amongst men to preserve freedom and liberty and that it is very hard to give up any government even when it becomes contrary to the needs of its people. The people will undergo great harm, even tyranny, before they finally have enough to change or abolish such government and to renew the tenets that government is given few things to do and must, actually, do them and leave the people to figure out the rest on their own. First we must do all the stupid things, the good feeling things, the bass ackward things until we finally realize that we are far better with little government than with much of it. Let us hope that we survive the troubled times ahead.
You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.
Supporting Friends and Allies
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