I've referenced Chris Martenson several times in past posts but he probably deserved more of my attention because he really does "get it". I'm sure he will get more of my attention going forward. Today I want to point out his recent interview of Bill Black. Bill Black was a lead regulator in investigating the 1980's banking crisis. His Wiki entry is well worth a read. Bill's concept of Control Fraud closely matches what I have been writing about for years: governments get in place initially to serve the people but over time they start looking out for themselves. They begin to treat the people like chattel; property; a renewable resource to be harvested. In order to do this, they, over time, systemically remove any safeties that limit their power grab. They create more and more restrictive laws and they enforce them selectively. If you are not a friend then you are an enemy and you are probably breaking some law. At the end of the day everyone can probably be convicted of some felony. They hollow out the money supply and begin to run Debt Ponzis. They reduce individual rights and freedoms all the while explaining how it is being done for the greater good, blah, blah, blah.
The reason that the United States became great over the past 200+ years was that people were free to work hard and to keep what they worked for. Without extensive "social nets" or a nanny state, people just did the right and sensible thing in order to maintain themselves. They did it because it was in their own selfish, self-serving interest to do so. They did it in acknowledgement of the fact that it is the nature of man to be selfish and to look out for #1. With everyone working in their own best interest, GROUP productivity was high and GROUP prosperity followed.
Unfortunately, not all people are created equal. Some are smarter, some are natural leaders, some are physically stronger, some are harder workers and some are better looking. In the past, people would take stock of their God given gifts and make the best of them. Unfortunately, some people apparently have little to offer. They are weak, stupid, ugly, boring, lazy, crippled, etc. They either have to work extra hard within their God-given constraints to add value to society or they will not do well in life. Steven Hawking is the poster child for this. He worked hard to overcome his God-given constraints. He proved that his apparent disability did not stop him from contributing. He did not need to be coddled. This is the natural order of things: no free rides, period. It is not a happy thing that this is the case but it cannot be denied and it cannot be changed by government mandates and "programs". People must remain in charge of their own lives or society will eventually crumble and collapse. When government tries to remain relevant by stepping in and controlling people's lives, it defies nature.
When Dubai created massive islands in the shape of world continents I laughed out loud and told my wife that if the ocean didn't put them there then they would not be there for very long. Today those multimillion dollar islands are sinking back into the sea. It is just ridiculous to do things that are so out of synch with nature because nature never sleeps. Thus, the maintenance of these things begins to require unlimited resources. In the end they collapse because nobody has limitless resources to maintain things. This is the problem with big government and the nanny state, especially when such governments have access to seemingly endless amounts of credit. It creates unnatural situations that are in government's own interest to perpetuate (bigger government) while being completely against the nature of man which is to profit from his own labor and to live in freedom and privacy while pursuing one's own view of happiness. At some point the ability to take on more debt collapses and all of the artificial things that government was paying for using debt collapse as well.
For its first 200 years, the United States was the engine of global progress because our government was relatively new. It had not had time to become infested with self serving bastards who actually think public money is their own piggy bank. But now the whole damned thing is one big corrupt mess. When some organization like the GSA gets caught partying too hard, the rest of the government slaps it down in a public show, but this is all just theater. The real con men running the government are stealing billions through Control Fraud all the while convincing ignorant citizens that it's all for the better. The fact that all of this fraud is being "paid for" with mounting debt seems to mean little to most people. The fact that many cities and states are bankrupt also seems to have escaped people's attention.
Folks, it's time to revert to the natural order of things gracefully before an un-orderly reversion to the mean occurs simply because there is no other choice. We need to honor hard working producers and reward them by letting them keep more of what they earned instead of uplifting people who have given up on the natural daily battle for existence and prosperity in favor of receiving government assistance. Handouts for every special interest are now just assumed. Nobody cares who pays for these but if you ask the proponents of them to bear the cost for their own special interest they would not like it and they will not pay it. They shamefully want all of us to share their special interest. They want to use rule of taxation laws to force us to participate in supporting their socialistic ideals even though history has shown time and again that they don't work. They want to steal the profits of our work and redirect it for their own purposes. The historical term for this is slavery.
Sorry folks, I have my own charities that I contribute to. I don't want to contribute to yours and I'm not trying to demand that you contribute to mine. When I see an able bodied homeless man on the street corner begging for cash I want to get out of my truck and give him a medicinal back hand and tell him to go get a fraking job - any job - just like the rest of us. I don't care what their hard luck story is. They are walking around just fine so they can work instead of begging. When I see people asking for free needles for drug addicts, free condoms for children, free ANYTHING, it makes my blood boil. Nothing is free. Making anything free to some people is simply wealth transfer from other hard working people. It is a form of theft. History shows very clearly that all it does in aggregate is to encourage people to ask for more free stuff. Government does this because it is playing on people's desires to receive something-for-nothing. In other words, government is playing the nature of man against the citizens it is supposed to be representing. It does this to the detriment of society for the sole purpose of buying votes so that useless bureaucrats can remain in power.
Along these same lines, I'm very sorry that it is the nature of man to grow old and to die. It is very unfortunate that we were not designed to live forever. But it is the natural order of things and we all have to come to grips with it. Creating a socialized medical system that promises old people unending medical care at exponential cost to be borne by the working class is mathematically unworkable. It is a vote-buying scam propagated by politicians in order to stay in power. If allowed to occur it will mean yet another burden on the working class to pay for something that will not be there for them when they get old.
Social Security is the same thing: it is already bankrupt and all social security payments being made today are only possible because of the United States' ability to take on more debt. This cannot last forever. Someday people will recognize that we cannot pay our debt and indeed have no plans to do so. At that point interest rates will skyrocket like they did in Greece and are now doing in Spain and Italy. That is when people will be told that the programs they have been paying into all their lives must be abandoned. That is when fools who have been supporting the nanny state will finally realize the actual degree of their ignorance and foolishness. That is when people will finally figure out that government has been running a Debt Ponzi.
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3 comments:
I beg to differ: America was great 200+ years ago, but it has relentlessly shed its founding glory to become the Mafia that it is nowadays.
The enterprise became criminal when, at Bretton-Woods, as payment for the Normandy, it gained the license to conjure money up. This allowed American businesses to have access to virtually unlimited credit at a time when the rest of the industrialized countries had been ravaged by war, many bombed criminally by American forces.
It has been tried before by uncountable countries for dozens of centuries, but they always ended up seeing their currencies destroyed. Not America, which got the exorbitant privilege of being given a captive market for its inflated currency, which could then be exported.
No business anywhere else in the world could tap endless credit, so the world came to be the territory of America's con... ahem, business, which it defended viciously as any criminal racket is.
I fear for what may happen when those exploited for decades by America can raise their heads and realize how weak it now is. Perhaps not unlike the barbaric invaders which sacked Rome several times.
God bless America and the whole world.
I have commented in detail in the past on much of what you posted. I agree that America's price for helping Europe to win WW2 was control of the world's money supply. Of course, this control also helped the world rebuild too. No doubt that the USA benefitted more though.
On the other hand if you have a landlord and a renter and the landlord benefits more from the deal, does that mean that the renter should live on the street instead of seeing the landlord get ahead? Same with manufacturing. Apple is getting waaaay ahead of the economy by providing something the economy wants but at ridiculously inflated prices. But the economy wants it and so one could argue that under the rules of capitalism it is a fair deal.
The world agreed to Bretton Woods. They thought it was in their best interest. And perhaps at the time it was. But the US moneymen knew that the value they could extract over the long run was much more than any of the other B-W participants was counting on. In some ways its a toss up between the US being a con man and the world being a willing patsy. In any case, the US currently does not force others to use the dollar. They do it when and where they think it benefits them. In many ways the US is less screwed up than other places. The coming housing bust in Canada and Australia and China is going to be major proof of this.
Finally, yes, the US does use its military in order to serve its business interests. This is a total scam. Taking lives in the name of freedom while really doing it for money is nothing short of evil. There is no excuse for it.
I think that a better analogy would be a landlord who cornered the market and gouged the renters. Willingly or not, patsies can still try to make the landlord pay. Think of them demanding world-wide NYC-style rent controls...
Without arguing what B-W really was and the role played by the parties, perceptions are more important than facts when the events unravel.
Cheers.
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