America Catches Cold

If Obama and his ilk were true visionaries, the lessons he would take away from what has been happening in China and Iran is that massive, monolithic government does not work. What is needed instead is a light touch that allows a people’s natural instincts to deal with diversity on its own terms. Lhasa, Urumqi and Tehran have demonstrated that public unrest is not spawned by democratic governance but by paranoid, autocratic rule that does not respect its constituents and always takes a defensive stance.

Jesus was to have said that the poor will always be with you. If we stipulate this to be true – discounting for the moment ‘poor’ as it might pertain to the spirit or intelligence – then Obama’s redistributionist policies cannot end well. By taking from the rich and giving to the poor, all he’d be doing is changing hats. It’s a simple-minded approach in that it fails to take into account that which has made the rich rich and left the poor poor. Switching hats, not only requires the suppression of a group that does not deserve it, but will ultimately deprive the nation as a whole of its ability to create wealth.

The perception that wealth equals power is not entirely wrong. Wealth per se, however, is so much more than dollars and cents. It is the result of talent, creativity, hard work, discipline and ingenuity. A people lacking in these qualities will never succeed. Being the sudden recipients of a windfall by virtue of government edict, they will squander the best efforts of those who have actually earned it. Look at what happened in Zimbabwe.

Similarly, governments simply printing money are on the road to economic Armageddon. The U.S. banks know this; the public knows this - if not expressly, they know it instinctively. God help us should the banks start lending, causing the economy suddenly to pick up now. All our accumulated IOU’s; our manic matchstick money - based only on debt – would simply burst into flames. Inflation would devour it like we haven’t seen before. Again, the value of a nation’s currency is backed by the value of the work it produces. If a government’s policy is to actively cheapen the nature of work, to discourage or even hinder it; to confer that work on people not qualified to do it, that nation will reap the bitter fruits of collapse.

If it happens, only monolithic governance is capable of causing such an outcome. It will be impossible to contain the chaos just on the fiscal side. Social and institutional structures can be expected to vaporize. Government itself will fall, leaving a sucking sound.

We are on the precipice. Not government, only the people themselves can save us now. It has been said that when America sneezes, the whole world catches cold. The truth is that when America implodes, it’ll drag the whole world into the maelstrom along with it. I wonder if our new president gets off on that.