Death, famine, pestilence, and war. These are the four horsemen of the the Apostle John's apocalyptic vision. Not much could be worse. Yet we have found something that--combined with the existing four--is worse. Enter two new horsemen, bearing down on us, their mounts full of wanton eyes and nostrils flaring...My kids and I from time to time will have a discussion about the proverbial money tree. Man, it would be nice, they say, to have our very own! Yes, it would, I say--if our family had the only one. But if everyone had one, the prices of everything that money could buy would be consumed in a conflagration of hyperinflation.
Franklin D. Roosevelt had a lot of good intentions. But he had no common sense. He thought government was a lot like a money tree. Now, his socialist chickens have come home--in the 20th century--to roost. And they--misnamed Social Security and Medicare--are shitting all over us.
It is critical that we learn how to take
care of our fellow man. It is equally critical to understand that government has no idea how to accomplish this task. Franklin D. Roosevelt had a 'vision' that government could do the job quite nicely. His acolytes had been to Joe Stalin's Soviet Union, and they were eyewitnesses to Potemkin nirvana. They brought home with them that greatest of lies, and in the process destroyed mens' initiatives to take care of themselves as well as their neighbors. As a result, we have retreated into our TV rooms, seldom to emerge to even notice that we have neighbors. We have never quite recovered from FDR's great blunder. History has proven FDR the political idiot, yet few seem to notice, because we much prefer our television shows to our history books, and our emotive history books to our accurate ones.Roosevelt's vision particularly targeted blacks, thinking themselves the greatest of benefactors by giving them temporary jobs--which taught them and many others in essence that they could not survive without the 'beneficent hand' of government, and which left them and their tens of thousands of fellow Americans more destitute than before as soon as their make-work government jobs ran out.
Roosevelt took advantage of Americans' skittishness following an establishment-engineered stock market crash and subsequent government 'tuning' that turned an economic problem from an inconvenience into a fiasco.
President Herbert Hoover had his turn at righting the American economic boat, but his was a pittance of malfeasance when compared with the hubris of the self-proclaimed savior, FDR.
FDR never even tried to right our boat. He unwittingly tried to sink it. Seventy years later, he may have yet succeeded.
We find ourselves at the present time concerned about a military war in the Middle East. We are equally concerned about how we should react to a nuclear warhead that Iran is supposedly near to possessing. All the while we have been conditioned to avert our eyes from the more important war. The most serious conflict we are involved in is an economic one, yet we are too inflated with imperial hubris to even notice it.
Our downfall will not be because of our military overstretch, although that will contribute substantially to it. Our downfall will manifest itself by economic cataclysm, yet its harbinger was our loss of self-reliance, unleashed from Pandora's box by Franklin Roosevelt. If we don't right America's boat soon, great will be the sinking thereof.
America can yet be prosperous. But it won't be due to the ghoulish hand of the government dole. If we want to take care of our old aged, our children, and ourselves, government must get out of our way and allow us to remind ourselves of our innate sense as to how this task can be accomplished.
The six horsemen are coming. If you listen carefully, you can hear their hoof beats now.
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Very well put... I think that the basic human trait to be able to take of one another has been very well suppressed by the government, but I think it still exists in each of us, we just need to learn that we can trust eachother to do so.
ReplyDeleteA money tree does indeed exist. It's called the Federal Reserve.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, socialistic and communalistic policies have done much to enhance the desire of citizens to take from their fellow citizens. (UK, I know that's not what you meant, and I am pursposefully twisting your phrase, but bear with me here.)
ReplyDeleteWhen a major presidential candidate stands up and says that the government should give $5000 to each baby born, people applaud. Where do they think this money is going to come from? We are all giddy about the government handouts that we believe to be our right to receive, but where does the money for these handouts come from?
FDR liked to talk about the forgotten man, meaning the downtrodden. Unfortunately, he spawned an attitude that has become pervasive. Today, the true forgotten man is the American taxpayer and the future taxpayers that will pay later for today's spending.
Reach,
ReplyDeleteIronically, the original "Forgotten Man" was the American worker/tax payer, who was having a hard time making ends meet.
FDR hijacked the phrase, Hollywoodized it, and it stuck.
Frank, where did you get your information about "establishment-engineered stock market crash"? Obviously they glossed over that in Econ 101. :) Would be very interested in your sources.
ReplyDeleteMatthew,
ReplyDeleteFor example, read the first 50-75 pages of "The Forgotten Man" by Amity Shlaes. The interesting part of this whole thing is that the crash wasn't the worst problem. The worst problem was that Hoover, and to a much greater extent, FDR tried to fix it with socialist policies that prolonged the problem and made it worse.
Yikes! Just read my previous comments and realized a fatal error... I meant "the basic human trait to take care of one another.
ReplyDeleteThe "Forgotten Man" is an excellent essay, and has unfortunately been twisted to support Socialism by most politicians since FDR.
I think it's time for us to stop being forgotten.
Don't forget Utah's contribution to the Depression - Smoot-Hawley.
ReplyDeleteGood point. You are correct. Smoot Hawley was a travesty as it embroiled much of the rest of the world in our problems and caused them all to be worse.
ReplyDelete