Tags
al Qaeda, broken government, China, congress, Day of Rage, Day of Sternly-Worded Constructive Criticism, Day of Wrath, fascism, North Korea, Palestinians, pissedoffedness, President Obama, protest, Protesting Is Fun!, Russia, scabies, Weathermen
By Smaktakula
Many Americans think government is broken. President Obama pushes gamely ahead with his unique brand of doe-eyed fascism, despite the increasingly vocal resistance of the American people. Partisan rancor is de rigueur in Washington today, and Congress is only slightly more popular than scabies.
On Monday, April 26th, Promethean Times calls upon all Americans to take a stand against these myriad maladies by rising as one on in a Day of Sternly-Worded Constructive Criticism.
There is precedent: Palestinians had a Day of Rage (borrowing the term from American terrorist organization, The Weathermen), a protest against Israeli settlements. In Russia, thousands gathered in a Day of Wrath to protest against the unrelenting shittiness of their backwater nation.
The Palestinians Can Usually Find Something To Be Pissed About
Clearly, the “Day Of” phenomenon is about to take off, and America dare not be left behind. You can bet that her enemies in China and North Korea won’t be waiting; al Qaeda is no doubt picking out its own special day at this very moment. America must act now before all the really good words are gone.
Promethean Times would normally be inclined to call for a day of great anger not unlike those trademarked by the Palestinians and Russians, perhaps ‘A Day of Fury’ or ‘A Day of Ire.’ Either would be fitting. The American people, for so long rightly proud of their unique liberties and cherished freedoms, have seen their leaders give away their right to make their own health choices, and in turn created a new right for a small segment of the population: the right to subsidised healthcare. ‘Subsidised’ is a lot like ‘free,’–in both instances the recipient gets the service without paying. However, ‘free’ means without cost, ‘subsidised’ means some other dude pays for it.
So yeah, some honest-to-God pissedoffedness would be pretty welcome right now.
It Sure Is.
But as a nation, America is probably too apathetic to summon those levels of indignation for something as trivial as their constitutional rights. Americans reserve rage for the guy who cuts them off on the freeway, and wrath for a television network foolish enough to cancel a cult show. But sternly-worded constructive criticism? Americans can still handle that.
Promethean Times 
One thing that bothers me most about Americans is that we take our politics like a Pez dispenser, in small sweet doses, and coming from a funny shaped head.
I for one understand that it is not my money, it is someone else’s. I also believe that all taxes are thief. Like the mafia, they do not ask they take, yes you might be able to not pay them, but like not paying the mafia, you end up losing in the long run.
Now the problem I have with the Tea party, followers of Dr. Ron Paul, and even Libertarian for that matter, is that America is way too depended on sucking on the tit of America, remember I said that as I continue.
The Tea party, followers of Dr. Ron Paul and Libertarians want less government. Dr. Paul in his Campaign for Liberty wanted to cut most forms of government: USPS…gone, Public Schools…gone, Welfare…gone, Medicare…gone, Social Security…gone, just to name a few and I can live with that, it’s not our money it’s someone else’s money. Government is force; it is the gun that allows others to do their bidding.
The reason that political action will not work is that it is simply a numbers game — here is the proof.
Slightly over half of all Americans 52.6 percent now receive significant income from government programs, according to an analysis by Gary Shilling, an economist in Springfield, N.J.
That’s up from 49.4 percent in 2000 and far above the 28.3 percent of Americans in 1950.
1 in 5 Americans hold a government job or a job reliant on federal spending.
A similar number receive Social Security or a government pension.
About 19 million others get food stamps
2 million get subsidized housing
5 million get education grants. For all these categories, Mr. Shilling counted dependents as well as the direct recipients of government income.(also, free daycare from state schools)
Approximately 85% of the state’s 235,000 employees (not including higher education employees) are unionized. As the governor noted during his $83 billion budget roll-out, over the past decade pension costs for public employees increased 2,000%. State revenues increased only 24% over the same period. A Schwarzenegger adviser wrote in the San Jose Mercury News in the past few days that, “This year alone, $3 billion was diverted to pension costs from other programs.”
There are now more than 15,000 government retirees statewide who receive pensions that exceed $100,000 a year, according to the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility.
Many of these retirees are former police officers, firefighters, and prison guards who can retire at age 50 with a pension that equals 90% of their final year’s pay. The pensions for these (and all other retirees) increase each year with inflation and are guaranteed by taxpayers forever—regardless of what happens in the economy or whether the state’s pensions funds have been fully funded (which they haven’t been).
A 2008 state commission pegged California’s unfunded pension liability at $63.5 billion, which will be amortized over several decades. That liability, released before the precipitous drop in stock-market and real-estate values, certainly will soar.
Now many Ron Paul followers, do not understand is that if Ron Paul did win the 2008 Presidential Election, and did cut those forms of government, is the backlash. You can imagine on your local News, let’s take just one form governmental cut for example. USPS. All mail would halt, they would chain themselves up and not allow any mail to run. People who are waiting on checks would cry to the media. The news would show old people not getting their money, dying, and USPS workers chaining themselves to the trucks and building that they work. Now would the US send the military to kill their own on national TV to get the mail going again, with no monetary compensation? Hell no. So the president has to buckle.
Would teachers crying to the media telling people that they only want to teach the children, go over well with the public? Would a teacher 2 years from retirement, give it all up so she can make America better? No.
This public discourse for the government is nothing new it’s been going on for a little over 150 years, with great geniuses who are very passionate people like Ayn Rand, Frédéric Bastiat, Lysander Spooner, Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, you name it, these people have written about this stuff, and are the best of the best. Now look at this amazing line of people who are far, far, smarter then I’ll ever be, and look at that history and think if all these geniuses have completely failed in their mission to control and limit the size of the STATE, through writing, through rational argument, through imperial evidence, through political action. If they all completely failed and we now have the largest government known to all of mankind, I am not going to think I am smarter than them. So we say they failed and let’s move on and not replicate their mistakes. I am not going to write a better novel then Atlas Shrugged. I’m just not going to do it. I am not going to be a better economic theorist then Von Mises, just not going to happen. So knowing that I am not smarter than them and I can learn from their mistakes, so then what are we suppose to do?
People in Libertarian circles are very addicted to politics and I can understand why. If you don’t know what to do, and you are fed up you tend to walk down that foggy deathtrap road to political action.
I think when people regularly get there ass kicked on a daily basis, they need not go back to fighting and get there ass kicked again, over and over. What I mean by that is to recognize that politicians and statist intellectuals, teachers and priest, and the media, and everyone who is propped up by and support this massive edifice of a statist way of thinking that towers over all of us. Remember that these people are not dumb. They are not dumb, because if they are dumb then we are even dumber, because they regularly kick our ass. Reason and Evidence has had it ass handed to it since Plato and Socrates, and before, all the way to the present. That’s 2500 years of Reason and Evidence getting it’s ass handed to it, being the 98 pound weakling, who’s getting sand kicked in his face by the dumb-ass brute majority idiots, who are incredibly sophisticated in their drive for and desire and achievement of power. States are really good at gathering power and expanding and we as freedom thinkers have been regularly had are asses kicked all over school and our lunch money get stolen. That’s the reality. Our best and brightest thinkers have not even received a smidgen of what they wanted. They haven’t even slowed down the size of the growth of the state. The people we see as weak and stupid, have massively triumph in every way. So political action is not going to work.
There are only two classes of people in this world and Karl Marx got this wrong, there is the productive class, and there is the parasitical class. There is the class that gains it wealth through voluntary exchange, and there is the class that gains it wealth directly or indirectly through violence, that is it. The bankers and the welfare recipients are on the same side. They receive money through force, through violence, through the government. The bankers and the government teachers with their off three months a year, ridiculous pensions, professional development days, assigning homework to kids, because it’s easier then to teach them in class. These people are in the parasitical class and on the other side, and this is the class which is rapidly dying, falling away crumbling and diminishing, in the Atlas Shrugged model. And this is the class being preyed upon. This is why voting to reduce the government doesn’t work. If you believe, if you genuinely believe that you can get people to give up there $100,000 dollar pensions, if you really think that’s possible, then this is my suggestion to you: Forget about theories, theories are a huge waste of time, empiricism, empiricism, empiricism is all that matters, if you think you can talk people out of giving up their state offered money. Here’s what you do: You go to your local supermarket, or and wait at the service desk till someone comes who has a winning lottery ticket, and it has to be a good winning ticket, couple of thousand bucks at least.
Then you need to say to that person, “You know you gotta not cash that in.”
“This is all government funded and money is taken from people… so it’s wrong and immoral for you to cash this winning ticket in. Give it to me and we’ll tear it up together and all be happy walking out brothers in freedom happy know we created a sunny and better future.”
Or go to an old folks home and telling them not to cash anymore Social Security checks, or go to the ghetto and asking them to not cash in their welfare checks?
How well do you think that’s going to go over???
Of course the government has endless laws against conflict of interest. In any sane system if you got government money you should not be allowed to vote, of course a clear conflict of interest, but that’s not the point, the point is to give you the money, to buy your vote for more government spending. Now they have been creating this over time. They get more and more people addicted to Statist money and then those people become addicts, so of course they are not going to give it up. More than 50% of people would have to give up a significant portion of their income. No that will NEVER happen, and that is why voting is never going to work.
Walk away from politics; work on not becoming addicted to statist money yourself. I can offer many practical solutions that are not political based. It’s up to you to decide.
I vote for Day of the Dead. Well written piece. Thank you PT.
‘Subsidised’ is a lot like ‘free,’–in both instances the recipient gets the service without paying. However, ‘free’ means without cost, ‘subsidised’ means some other dude pays for it.
What a great line.