RANDOM THOTS

When as man as dishonest as any who has ever held the office, with an economic record as dismal as that of the last four years, a man who refused to wear a flag pin on his lapel because he disdains the country he aspires to lead, a man who chose as his mentor a preacher who called in no uncertain terms upon God to bring damnation on America, when the people elect and then re-elect such a man to the Presidency you know you are no longer living in the land envisioned by the founders.  You are no longer living in an America as you have always known it.

Tuesday marked the start of the Post-American period for the United States.  Benjamin Franklin feared it; sages from Aristotle to Tocqueville predicted it; Democracy guaranteed it; too few people understand it; Barack Obama neither caused it nor led it.  He simply is presiding over the culmination of it.

It would take a thick book and a half to explain it but I will be foolish enough to try to do it in one paragraph.

Aristotle was the first to say that Democracy would bankrupt a society.  Karl Marx promoted the process with the populist theme “From each according to his ability to each according to his need.”  Today the same philosophy is expressed in the simple phrase Social Justice, which is defined as equal wealth for all.  Government is the vehicle for reaching that goal by taxing wealth away from those who produced it and re-distributing it to those who did not.  In any society achievers will be outnumbered by the masses and Aristotle warned that the masses would eventually deplete the national treasury by voting the wealth of the nation unto themselves and then squandering it.  He called it “the ultimate greed.”

It’s a slow process in a country with a large and prosperous middle class.  Freedoms must be taken away slowly and dependence created gradually.  It has been said that “The American people would never vote for socialism, but under the name of liberalism the American people would adopt every fragment of the socialist program.”  If Socialism is the ultimate greed then Obamacare was the ultimate deception.  It’s primary purpose was dependance, not healthcare.

How will it all end?  That’s the ultimate question.  Democratic countries like Spain, France and Greece have been ravished by overspending.  Unemployment is worse than it is in the United States.  The governments are literally running out of money to pay for benefits the people have come to believe really are entitlements.  The people riot, demonstrate and take to the streets demanding change then vote for a man like Hollande who promises to bring about the desired change by accelerating the very policies that caused the problem in the first place.

I am 81 years of age and will never know how it ends, but my grandchildren will.  That’s why my tagline reads “Driven by love of country and concern for its people, both present and yet to be.”