Who rules America today? Not the people; they have been vanquished.
America is ruled today by a collectivist Troika – an Executive-Congressional
Combine, Judicial Oligarchs, and a Corporatist Banking Cartel – who have as
much concern for the resplendent principles that formed our country as street
pimps have for romance and love. How has this Troika come to possess its
power over our lives? It has accrued its power by conveying endless
privileges (handouts, subsidies, loans, quotas, monopolies, price controls,
tax breaks, etc.) to an ever-swelling mobocracy. This buys the mobocracy’s
support every election year and insures the Troika’s permanency.
Who comprises the mobocracy? Sixty million Americans looking to get more
out of life than they have a right to: government bureaucrats, corporate
quislings, welfare parasites, media lackeys, union members, Black and Latino
minorities, feminists, gays, environmentalists, Hollywood decadents, illegal
aliens, unemployable misfits, and hordes of other obtuse voters.
Is this being unfair to Blacks, Latinos, gays, and feminists? To union
workers and welfare recipients? Not at all. These groups demand and receive
from the federal government quotas, monopolistic protections, hiring
dictates, and subsidies to advance themselves in the marketplace. This
violates their fellow citizens’ rights to free association, to free trade,
and to their property. Such conveyance of “special privileges” is the reason
why we are now $110 trillion in debt, why lobbyists annually converge upon
Washington like weevils to the gristmill, and why Americans have voted a
blatant Marxist radical into the highest office of the land.
All of these demands are unjustified. No one has the right to mandate by
law that others like, accept, and associate with them. No one has the right
to monopolize his labor organization by government dictates. No one has the
right to coerce subsidies from the earnings of others. Yet this is what is
taking place pervasively throughout our country. Lobbyists to Congress and
dictates from the Supreme Court are now the means to advance our lives. No
longer do we depend upon self-reliance and persuasion to climb the ladders of
success.
The Troika’s bureaucracies now overwhelm our society. Oppressive taxes
stultify our teen to twilight years. The gangrene of corruption eats away at
the once honorable pillars of society. Catastrophic entitlement bankruptcy
looms over the horizon. And with each passing decade, drab and Machiavellian
mandarins extend their tentacles ever further into our lives, our businesses,
our finances, our religions, schools, charities, medical choices, child
rearing, and leisure time. Yet despite such insufferable intrusiveness from
the Troika, our establishment pundits remain impervious to the gross
immorality and ultimate ramifications of it all.
We are told by prominent foundation scholars that our nation is
experiencing only a temporary bump in the road, that we are still headed
toward an “unlimited future of economic prosperity and social justice in a
New World Order of triumphant American hegemony.” We are informed by
Democratic savants in face of populist unrest in the heartland that
“Americans don’t want less government, only more efficient government,” and
by Republican sycophants that “a spirit of bipartisanship rather than radical
reduction of government is needed.”
Mixed Economy Is the Problem
Such are the illusions of today’s smarmy Demopublicans and slick political
operatives, so ensconced in their Beltway celebrity, so jaded with their
egalitarian sophistries that they are incapable of seeing the most obvious
facts of economic and historical reality. Such intellects as these have lived
in (or catered to) Alice’s Washington Wonderland for so long and have become
so emotionally committed over the years to its siren call of collectivism,
that it now becomes impossible to opt out and face up to the destructive
perversions of their Great Society, even as its socio-economic structure
crumbles all around them.
The paramount question, now that the Great Planned Society has so
obnoxiously failed, is what can be done? One hopeful sign: a growing band of
libertarians, conservatives, and patriots from across the spectrum has
grasped the seriousness of this past century’s horrific prodigality.
Will this awakening be in time, however? Americans are still confused
politically and economically. They are still of the Roosevelt-Keynesian
belief that we need to pursue a mixed economy of half-capitalism and
half-socialism – eschewing political decentralization and free-market
economics. In other words, continue accommodating American ideals with
collectivist programs, only elect some new politicians who will make such an
immoral and irrational system work.
On the contrary, such an approach to politics will change nothing. It is
not the “politicians” we have elected, but the “ideological policies” we have
adopted that have taken us to the despotic state of affairs that now plague
our lives.
Such an insight is quite clear to those who understand that “ideas have
consequences” in the evolution of social and political institutions. The
problem is that such a truth is not being imparted to the intelligent youth
of America. Consequently they go out into the world unwarned about the sophistry
and demagoguery awaiting them from political men of zeal in search of votes.
Lessons for the Young
Our youth need to be told that there are natural laws at work in the
universe, and if one’s political ideology is in contradiction to those
natural laws, no amount of personnel changes will make it work. They need to
be told that our welfare state ideology – structured upon progressive
taxation, monetary inflation, and congressional conveyance of priviliges – is
in contradiction to those laws. It is this ideology that must also be
eliminated from Washington, not just the politicians who attempt to implement
its odious contradictions.
Our youth need to be told that it is naive and superficial to get all
caught up in the surface aberrations of political bribes and sleaze factors
that so impress the media pundits – as if dramatic disclosures of the
participants in scandals and graft are heroic salvations for the Republic.
They need to be told that such grubby episodes are nothing but symptoms of a
much deeper ailment; and that ailment is the disastrous premise of liberalism
that says government can erect a Great Society by conveying privileges to the
mobocracy instead protecting the rights of the people.
Our youth need to be told that no matter which political party is in
power, as long as the government is allowed to dispense special privileges
and subsidies to select groups of voters in order to gain their support at
election time, an endless array of corruption and graft is guaranteed. They
need to be told that this is the nature of any system that allows its
politicians the power to redistribute income in order to gratify needs and
desires so as to buy votes. They need to be told that such a system is
manifestly unjust, and that the mendacious humbugs who converge upon
Washington every four years to wheel and deal in its labyrinthine networks of
favors and controls are nothing but range-of-the-moment animals, who will
always be driven by consuming lusts for the status and wealth that accompany
their prestigious positions in Washington. Our youth need to be told that
this is the irremediable nature of man and the inevitable plight of any
society that attempts to establish a government of “favors arbitrarily
conveyed” rather than “laws objectively applied.”
The Deeper Disease
As long as those in positions of intellectual responsibility (in the
media, the universities, and the business community) continue to evade these
facts and these necessities, America will continue to degenerate as a
country. It is the responsibility of all “thinking men and women” to be able
to carry the cause and effect relationships of life back to root causes and
not get caught up in meaningless superficialities – and then to explain such
root causes to the youth of our country.
Rising prices, recessions, massive debt, educational decline, political
corruption, punitive taxes, and the explosion of government intervention that
we are suffering from today are all merely “effects” of a much deeper
disease, and as such cannot be solved until that deeper disease is identified
and eliminated. That disease is the collectivist-liberal ideology that has
politically dominated this country since 1932, and philosophically dominated
her since the turn of the century.
It is this disease that we have injected into the minds of our youth for
100 years. We have taught them that large factions of voters can have
government services for free through progressive taxation – yet not ignite
“infinite demand” for government growth. We have taught them that they can increase
the nation’s wealth by printing trillions of paper dollars – yet not incur
ever-higher prices and a chaotic boom-bust economy. We have taught them that
they can create a morally relativist society in which do-your-own-thing
lifestyles replace the rights and wrongs of natural law – yet not incur
debility and degradation. Such a philosophy has been instilled into our young
people as “humanitarian,” “progressive,” “sophisticated,” “cognizant of new
world conditions” – when it is, in essence, nothing but a heedless effort to
suspend the fundamental laws of existence.
The reversal of this nefarious drift will not come easily. As a pundit of
an earlier age, Walter Lippmann, wisely observed: “What is left of our
civilization will not be maintained, what has been wrecked will not be
restored, by imagining that some new political gadget can be invented, some
new political formula improvised which will save it. Our civilization can be
maintained and restored only by remembering and rediscovering the truths, and
by re-establishing the habits on which it was founded.”
The lesson to be gleaned from this past century is clear and stark: we as
a people must renounce the inexcuseable prodigality of liberalism and its
ruling Troika. This will require that we retrace the philosophical steps that
built America and throw out all our manifold treasons to the Founders. There
can be no half-way measures. America will live again in the future only if we
are willing to restore the Jeffersonian ideal that gave us birth. Lincoln’s centralization
– Wilson’s progressivism – FDR’s New Deal – LBJ’s Great Society – Nixon’s
middling conservatism – today’s Obamanation must all be purged from our
governing aspirations. Nothing short of the Jeffersonian ideal will save us.
Our youth need to be taught this crucial philosophical necessity.