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My perception is that this long paralyzing decession has sapped much of the animal spirits out of the entrepreneurial class in America - a class whom with each passing year, methinks, is growing smaller as a percentage of population and who is becoming increasingly discouraged about their future prospects. We've more Americans that want to make a difference, but fewer with the intellectual autonomy, character and drive to do so. President Obama mirrors this new emerging, less competitive, individualistic and independent national character.  The majority of people now either want or need to be taken care of to some greater or lesser degree.  The people who drive our economy, the people who create jobs and aspire to make life better for the many, the people who pay 40% of the taxes, the people who end recessions see an America, the bulk of whose citizens are shunning responsibility and in respect to fixing the country's most serious problems, have no sense of practicality whatsoever: they see an America that is made up of more people looking to procure aid from the system than not, who care more about being green and narcissisticaly feeling good about themselves than working long hours*, doing what free markets dictate needs to be done, or getting materially ahead and raising a family.

There are now two generations of Americans most of whom don't even desire the American Dream as it has been known in the past; a house in a good neighborhood, two or three beautiful kids, a job with a solid and respected company ( not many of those left by their measure! ) Virtually all of their scarce disposable dollars are being spent on $4 coffees, the next generation of smart phones, Netflix subscriptions, video games, gym memberships and sun glasses.  They have been conditioned to be deeply suspicious about the profit motive. They believe greed is the primary economic mal de force. An America with nominal economic growth is OK by them.  Materialism just ain't chic. Better no economic growth than driving more carbon-fueled cars around, fracking our beloved terra firma, increasing the population, suppressing anti-democratic uprisings around the world, bio-engineering our food supply, having uninsured citizens, consuming a greater share of the world's resources, or increasing inequality.  These are our new national values.  These are the values Obama mirrors.  These are not the values required to build a new and prosperous America.  These are the values of national economic decline. 

The only thing sustainable about sustainability is stagnation...

*Speaking of working long hours have we ever had a President that works less than this one?  


M.D.T.

Monsters From the Id

It's more than likely impossible to reasonably explain mass societal self-delusion on an historical scale.  Our present toxic, socio-psycho-cultural-economic declinations reminds me a great deal of a central  theme from the great classic sci-fi film, Forbidden Planet, where we, like the advanced Krell civilization, are having the foundations of our free society destroyed by our own unconscious 'monsters from the Id'. How much personal liberty are we willing to relinquish and how much economic and intellectual self-punishment are western societies willing to self-inflict to absolve themselves from their original sin.... the God-given gift/curse of self-consciousness.... and the accompaning both enviable and pitiable awareness that we, as a species, forever and intractably, stand alone outside of the natural order and all of creation looking in - that we can never truly understand our role in the natural order - that we'll forever be, from ourselves, at our very essence ... intruders.



Wyatt Earp: What makes a man like Ringo, Doc? What makes him do the things he does?  Doc Holliday: A man like Ringo has a great empty hole through the middle of him. He can never kill enough, or steal enough, or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.  Wyatt Earp: What does he need?  Doc Holliday: Revenge.  Wyatt Earp: For what?  Doc Holliday: Being born.

From the movie Tombstone

M.D.T.

Ultimate Libertarian Bumper Sticker

SO WHAT'S YOUR LATEST PLAN FOR ELIMINATING ALL OF HUMAN SUFFERING?

M.D.T.

A Reckoning

It occurs to me as we watch the slow and painful spectacle of European disintegration unfolding that ultimately the productive members of society will have to pay back every penny of that squandered and borrowed by the unproductive and that the only way to separate the productive from the unproductive is with markets. Those wizards of smart, our social, political and financial elite, in their vainglorious  attempts to subvert and manipulate markets, ultimately will have no choice but to numbly stand by and watch as the irrepressible economic tsunami of the previously sublimated fiscal reckoning engulfs all the western democracies and beyond.* Markets can never be truly subverted, only diverted. The books will be balanced and the 'unseen hand' cares little about the morality of whom it chooses to be injured or spared in a crisis.  Markets operate consciously and unconsciously, manipulated and non-manipulated, ethically and non-ethically ... whether anyone recognizes them or not.  And as petty as it might sound, our economic future is by-in-large determined, disproportionately and unfortunately, by those other than whom we have in almost every historical instance, collectively chosen to blame.

*How many cans are there at the end of the road?

M.D.T.

It Can't Happen Here

Mr. America, walk on by your schools that do not teach Mr. America, walk on by the minds that won't be reached Mr. America try to hide the emptiness that's you inside But once you find that the way you lied And all the corny tricks you tried Will not forestall the rising tide of hungry freaks daddy!

Having been a pubescent Frank Zappa devotee in 1966 when these lyrics from Hungry Freaks Daddy resonated through the fertile psyche of the nascent underground counter-culture movement, I'd like to think Frank, had he lived, today would have been aghast to see that the movement which he served to spearhead has done more to undermine individualism and critical social thinking than anything. The tie-dyed kids who danced lyrically and spasmodically to his music have now infested professionally the corridors of our schools and government and spare no effort in protecting their sinecures and all pervasive, unchallengable, enviromental, politically correct, faux-compassionate, big-government mass-conformist worldview. (Step out of line and they'll take you away. It's time to stop, hey what's that sound ...) Veritable Hawthornian ostracism for those amongst you who dare to don the socially ignominious status of being ....a denier! Be forewarned. You're never going to get to 1000 Facebook friends if you persist with those viscerally dis-settling notions about the behavioral and artistic levelling effects of the Nanny State. Why, just look at all those little Rembrandts and Shakespeares our public school system and politically correct culture gestates on a regular basis. It's OK to stand out, but not too much..... Not so much it might make someone else feel inferior. Venerating individual achievement has frequently become perceived as a form of bullying.

Frank was the consumate individualist. Mocking and satirizing what he saw as the Stepford Wife, nine-to-five, American middle-class culture of the 1950's. I think he would have been equally critical of today's tattoo ridden, neo-grunge, quasi-illiterate, texting addicted, hip-hopping monolithic teen culture that dominates today's contemporary scene. I suspect too that he might have been highly critical of the nuevo-baby-boomer, share-the-wealth, don't keep score communalism that ameliorates the veneration and compensation justly due Mr. America's most individualistic wealth and artistic creators. And surely someone as perspicacious as Frank would have discerned the inherent destructive consequences to economic growth of the greenest generation's acquiescence to big-government's insinuation into almost every aspect of our lives. For after all, isn't every rule at some level a limitation of individual freedom? And isn't individual freedom of thought and expression the wellspring of all creativity both economic and artistic? Can there be true artistic freedom separate and distinct from economic freedom? Ever hear of Solzhenitsyn?

But probably most of all Frank would have been horrified that his children of the Mothers of Invention have created an American culture where nothing could shock anyone, no matter how disgusting, violent or perverted; where the guiding tenet of civility had become non-judgment; the blind acceptance of any viewpoint as legitimate; where civilization itself would potentially risk annihilation rather than risk offending someone.

Sorry Frank. Wish you were to here to see that despite your radically individualistic, creative admonishments on your tour de force debut album Freakout, it can happen here*... and we are Freaking Out, new sustainable, come together, non-offensive establishment style, somewhere in Kansas...and Minnesota... and Rome... and...


* 'It can't happen here' was another lyric from this influential album


M.D.T.

Pelosian

I've surely plenty of company with those whom when the year 1984 passed by quietly without major event, we somehow felt a small pang of disappointment. Well, better late than never! Endless similes have been made to Orwell's fabled, literary, distopian slogan, "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength", but probably none more viscerally quizzical and unsettling, til now, than Nancy Pelosi's equating the Tea Party's staunch opposition to increasing the country's debt limit as 'acting like terrorists'; essentially denoting that Fiscal Prudence is Terrorism. Or to express it more Pelosian... Government borrowing good, balanced budgets un-american. The pigs have moved into the farmhouse, are sleeping in the human's beds and we're all supposed to work harder and pay more taxes to make them comfortable and keep our mouth's shut. There are now two sets of rules; one for our leaders and another for us.

Not beyond a stretch of the imagination that we might soon see, in our neo-orwellian America, a new bumper sticker on leftist's cars, Expand Guantanamo ..... to make room for the Tea Party, the new terrorists.  After all, hasn't our would be patriotic American left already labeled Christians the American Taliban?

Unfiddlable

We’re against higher taxes not because you shouldn’t raise them in a recession but because you shouldn’t raise them EVER. This endless fiddling with the tax code is one of the major sources of economic uncertainty in the country and just leads to one party fiddling with the code to benefit their friends and preferred interests while they’re in power and vice versa. What’s worse is that allowing the government to perennially mess with it, in effect, necessitates, for appearances sake, a higher tax rate than would otherwise be required. A fairer, flatter, lower and consistent tax rate creates more revenue for individuals and the government via increased economic activity. We (the few, the proud, the rational) are against the Obama tax hikes because they will slow the economy and the net negative effect of a slower economy on government revenues is greater than the amount of extra money that might be garnered from higher rates.* Tax revenue soars when the economy is good. Lower, flatter, fairer, unfiddlable rates are good for the economy, whether we’re in recession or not.

So why if lower tax rates increases government revenue does the left stake they're credibility on this issue above all others? Their consuming obsession with fairness. They'd rather have their constituency make do with less than have a small minority do appreciably better. In numerical terms, if there were 10 people in the world they'd rather 9 have $1 and one have $2 than 9 have $2 and one have $100.

*And that my friends, summarized in a single concise statement, is what has been universally disparaged as voodoo economics in distinct contrast to the stonehenge economics practitioned by the Democrats which can be neatly summarized in their nothing short of pathological fallacy, more taxes equals more money.





M.D.T.