Webster

The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions." --American Statesman Daniel Webster (1782-1852)


Sunday, November 20, 2011

System failure on a global scale.


By Alan Caruba

We are living in times when the structures involving the global financial system, national security, and self-governance are under attack, decaying, or just self-destructing due to all the ills to which humanity is prone.

Wars in the twentieth century were always an example of either the failure of nations to resolve their differences or of the ancient human inclination to steal whatever they can from their neighbor. Wars organize this into armies for that purpose. The other cause for war is the necessity to rid the neighborhood of the crazy guy who’s hoarding weapons and building bombs.

What is occurring of late, however, goes beyond the usual casus belli to something far greater, a loss of faith in national and international banking systems, aggravated by the failure of nations to act in a prudent fashion to protect the wealth of their citizens and their national sovereignty.

The cause of this is socialism, the polite name for communism. Like Islam, it exists for world domination, the control of the population for the enrichment of those holding the reins of power. It is no accident that the U.S. Congress is filled with millionaires or those who soon will be.

Communism, the creation of a man who never held a job in his life, Karl Marx, and its theoretically gentler version, Socialism, has proved to be a failure wherever it was implemented. It is always introduced as the antechamber to utopia, a better life for everyone and it has always led to the slaughter of millions in the name of achieving it. It is just another form of slavery.

Socialism, as practiced throughout the United States and Europe, dependent as it is on the “redistribution of wealth” in the form of “entitlement” programs is now crashing down around the heads of various elected leaders.

As the former British Prime Minister of Britain, Margaret Thatcher, once famously said, “Sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.”

When you pile on debt beyond the mind’s capacity to imagine and you empower “super committees” or hold desperate meetings as are occurring in Europe, public faith in national currencies begins to disappear and with it a rational world in which goods and services generate income.

We are now 66 years since the end of World War Two, the war that followed “the war to end all wars”, World War One. Peace—the absence of war—lasted a scant twenty-one years in Europe before the latter cataclysm began in 1939.

Times of turmoil are the perfect opportunity for tyrants of every description to emerge, organize the collective anger, and launch new wars. In the past 66 years of “peace” there has been a succession of wars, usually between Communist and Capitalist nations such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars or civil wars. The recent wars and revolutions in the Middle East have been about oil and who gets to pump it out of the ground.

Threatening the entire world is the rise of the Islamic Revolution. Islam is less a religion than a battle plan for global conquest that has the added fillip of enslaving its adherents in a faith system that demands total obedience on pain of death. Unbelievers in general face this threat. Israel in particular always has.

Capitalism isn’t a perfect system, subject to periodic cycles of recession and depression, but it does require a greater measure of individual freedom than any other in order to encourage the kind of innovation and risk-taking that creates vast wealth-producing economies.

The problem the West is facing has been brought on by the profligate and often corrupt waste of the people’s wealth. This has been the result of metastasizing laws whose ultimate purpose is to keep populations from demanding more freedom from rapacious taxing, borrowing, and spending. Even central banks are powerless against this. Ours, the Federal Reserve, has responded by printing dollars out of thin air.

On November 18th a proposed constitutional amendment that would require Congress to balance the budget failed in the House. The U.S. is currently $15 trillion in debt. The worst fears of our Founding Fathers are coming true. Presiding over the nation is a Marxist ideologue and his henchmen.

When the Congress of the United States of America refuses to obey the limits of the Constitution, you have failure.

When that same Congress refuses to reform “entitlement” programs and reduce massive spending, you have failure.

When the Federal Reserve—a central bank that is not a part of the federal government— owns most of the nation’s debt, you have failure.

In my lifetime, the United States of America went from a largely Capitalist system and society to one of near total government control. It is Socialism supported by an insane system of taxation lacking even the appearance of fairness.

The United States has moved too far away from the purpose of the Constitution, established to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity…”

We are that posterity,

In the decades since the last Great Depression a succession of Congresses has bankrupted the nation once again. It is happening as well in Europe because nations like Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and France thought they too could defy common sense and fiscal prudence.

It is system failure on a global scale.

Americans and the citizens of Europe are the unwilling victims of too much government, too much regulation, too much corruption, too much taxation, and the general inclination of those in charge to acquire as much wealth for themselves while keeping the rest of the population complacent with “redistribution of wealth” schemes that always fail.

The Tea Party movement is calling for a restoration of America. We have precious little time to do that and it is the Democratic Party in league with unions who oppose that goal.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

5 comments:

  1. The problem with the Balanced Budget Amendment that lost was that it didn't cap spending, and it didn't require a super majority to raise taxes. The result would have been continued increases in government spending with corresponding increases in taxes.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The business cycle is caused by fiat money, fractional reserve banking and maturity transformation, none of which is essential to capitalism.

    The idea that depressions are capitalism's fault is a progressive talking point and doesn't belong here. I liked the rest of the post, though.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tim, it isn't just fiat money and the fractional reserve system. It's also a result of the government manipulation of interest rates, to make them artificially low.

    By forcing interest rates to be artificially low, it encourages businesses and individuals to invest in things they aren't yet ready to invest in...and this causes a type of inflation that cannot be sustained. When this malinvestment occurs, it's called a "bubble", and when it gets to the point that it's clear everyone was over-extended, that bubble bursts, and we have a "crash".

    (This is the "Austrian Economics" explanation of bubbles and crashes...and between the housing bubble, and the upcoming education bubble, among other examples, there is *strong* evidence that this occurs.)

    If we just got rid of central banking and government meddling in interest rates, we wouldn't *have* business cycles.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I agree with everything but this. "Americans and the citizens of Europe are the unwilling victims.."

    I could argue that there are no victims, just willing accomplices and "unwilling" hardly describes the voting patterns of the people.

    These (we) are people totally willing to ignore basic fairness and the Constitution if the politician promises THEM something taken from someone else.

    It's only now. The point where we have almost run out of "other peoples money", where even taking ALL that the rich have will not solve the problem, are "The People" starting to ask questions about spending. If "we" would not hold politicians to the limits of the constitution when it was easy, I find it hard to believe we will hold them accountable now that it's hard. Just look at the commercials run by AARP when medicare / medicaid came up for discussion.

    They can't find 1.2 trillion in cuts over 10 years, when we need run a surplus every year to avoid total collapse.

    Consider, with no spending increases, and no interest on our debt...

    If we ran a 1 BILLION dollar surplus, it would take 14 thousand years to pay it off our debt.

    That is the very meaning of insane

    Sadly, I have concluded that this "system failure on a global scale" as you call it, leads to only one end.

    Winston Churchill nailed it.

    "The era of procrastination, of half-measures,
    of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close.
    In its place we are entering a period of consequences."

    and those "consequences" are going to be world wide and bloody.

    ReplyDelete
  5. We are going to be in a world of hurt, the democraps talk about revenue enhancement*cough Taxes* Cough* it basically is giving another income stream for the spending junkies in the government. Now we have hit 15 trillion in debt. The super committee was a joke, the idjits basically dodged the issue until next election.

    ReplyDelete

I had to change the comment format on this blog due to spammers, I will open it back up again in a bit.