As I get more and more cynical about the future of our country, I think we need to recognize and accept a few things.
Firstly, our Founders designed our political structure with a few assumptions. One was that the population was to a very large extent comprised of property owners who were intelligent and able to understand that obligation went along with freedom. Another was that given the room, self-interest would insure that people worked hard to further themselves and thereby raise all citizens to higher and higher levels. The "common good" came from the freedom from government restriction and interference.
Secondly, the population today is not remotely the same as it once was, and that is unfortunate. We are just now hitting the tipping point of about 50% of the population paying taxes and the other half paying nothing in federal income tax. Guess what happens in all democracies when the voting population can just vote themselves more goodies and not have to pay for them?
So, starting with the notion of the income tax and redistribution of wealth in the first part of the 20th Century, we have gotten to this point, notch by notch. In my opinion we now have the dumbest mass of people who ever came out of an over funded but worthless public education system. They are sheep being led to the slaughter and all of the good work done to create this country is fast going down the drain.
It has happened to every democracy in history: voters vote themselves what they want, politicians promise them more, voters take them up on the offer, society unravels, and eventually dictatorship is accepted by citizens who can no longer stand the turmoil. Just watch it happening now, history in living color.
Not that this is an "encouraging" article (it's not, it's just a book review), but the excerpt is priceless. Thank you, Ayn Rand.
"A specter is haunting the [COLOR=#004276]Republican Party[/COLOR] — the specter of John Galt. In [COLOR=#004276]Ayn Rand[/COLOR]’s libertarian epic “Atlas Shrugged,” Galt, an inventor disgusted by creeping American collectivism, leads the country’s capitalists on a retributive strike. “We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it,” Galt lectures the “looters” and “moochers” who make up the populace. “We have no demands to present you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.”"
I believe it goes in cycles. Imagine if we had all this technology; internet, blogs, 24/news during:
A) Industrial revolution
B) Stock market crash of '29
C) Viet Nam
D) etc...
I think you get my point. I think during each one of those eras the news would be "we're totally screwed and things are only going to get worse." Yet here we are.
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I appreciate your point. Kind of like my parents believing that rock 'n roll was the end of civilization. I thought that was crazy, now I sort of see the downward progression they feared -even though my iPod is full of rock classics.
However, I don't think your argument addresses the fundamental problem: the United States was not designed and built for what we have within our borders today. I think when local elections started including voters who were not property owners but could still vote on property taxes, that was one of the first really big mistakes we made as a country. This was forced from the top down, by the way, by the federal courts. "One man one vote" democracy instead of a republic. We are about to raise our local property taxes significantly and the politicians locally designed the tax so that most voters will not have to pay anything. Those of us with business property and residences above the exempt amount will pay the full amount of the increase --and it will be big. One of the things to be built at taxpayer expense is a theme park to revitalize downtown. A circus for the masses. Some things never change, not even over 2,000 years.
The US Was Not Designed for This
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