Ain't Gonna Happen

First of all, Scotland's recent (Sept. 18, 2014) referendum proves it won't happen in America.

No, we are not Scotland, those people tend to be way more socialist than Americans are.  That just more than doubly proves my point.  Up until Sept.17, 2014, the vote was close, and at one point the secessionist vote was slightly ahead, but they still couldn't do it.  If a territory of people who mostly like big government and all that comes with it could only come close to a simple majority, then there's no way a land that ostensibly prides itself in "God, guns, and guts," but can only muster a bare 14% of strong support for seceding from the Union,  is going to pull away.

We are like the typical 14-year-old who wants to stomp our feet and demand to be treated like an adult when we want our way, but ten minutes later we are excusing our fear or stupid behavior by saying, "But I'm only a kid!"  The bottom 50% of income earners in the U.S. not only do not pay any income tax, but most of them are likely to get the "Earned Income Tax Credit."  Not the Orwellian title.  Then note that probably better than 15% of the people who are ostensibly working to earn a paycheck now are doing so by working for some government agency.  No, that's not an exaggeration. Take into account city, county, state and federal.  It really is that high.  But we can't just take into account the direct employees of government.  Think about all of the businesses that depend on government contracts to be in business.  Defense contractors.  Infrastructure. Welfare. Subsidies for business and farms.  The social security Ponzi scheme.  True free-enterprise has not existed unfettered since we got three things:  An income tax, a private central bank called the Federal Reserve, and Social Security.

The people who make up those percentages on the map above are rugged individuals who want to be free to succeed and be left alone.  But the vast majority don't care what government does as long as they can have their booze, drugs, cigarettes, sports or other mindless TV programming.  Politics is boring, dontcha know?  Until, that is, that the system implodes due to a collapsed, worthless dollar, and the sheep who survived the first couple of waves of riots over food and other necessities get herded into the FEMA camps.

Nope.  Americans haven't felt near enough pain yet to even start thinking about taking back control of the government, let alone learn the names of their congressmen or what the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution says.

And you also have to remember that there are way too many examples of this in the United States:

Good Example

I got the following from Grouchy Old Cripple in Atlanta.  It's a very simple object lesson.

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama's socialism would work, and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich – a great equalizer.The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan. All grades would be averaged, and everyone would receive the same grade – so no one would have to fail, but no one would be able to receive an A."
After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.
As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride, too, so they studied far less. The second test average was a D. No one was happy.
When the 3rd test finally rolled around, the average was an F.
As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased – but bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would agree to study for the benefit of anyone or everyone else. All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor explained to them that socialism would also ultimately fail for exactly the same reason – because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when someone (government) takes the reward away, no one will try or care enough to strive to succeed.
Couldn't be any simpler than that.
Remember, there IS a test coming up, we can't afford to fail in 2012.

Thomas Sowell once said sumpin' like socialism has a record of failure that is so obvious only a liberal could miss it.

Thanks, Denny.  We need to keep making this point every chance we get.

UPDATE:   I like this video version even better:

Best Statement #3 for 2011

From our man at OneCosmos

"The genuine problems that confront man are by no means "solved" by the left, just systematically ignored and obliterated, to man's eternal detriment. In the ideal world of the left, it would be against the law to even talk about the real problem(s); hence, political correctness, which is simply totalitarianism by other means. "

And none of that political correctness is going to go away until the whole mess of a system collapses.  Of course,  for those of us paying attention, we see it coming soon.

Thoughtful Question

Col. Bunny over at Eternity Road asked the question at the end of a thoughtful piece.

"If life with the ridiculous, laughable, pathetic God of creation is so horrific and unbearable, what do you think it’s going to be like without God?"

 It is most interesting to me because he says he is not a Christian.  It is sad to me that over my life I have noticed that some of the most moral people I've met have refused to take on any religious label, and most often would make the point of saying that they weren't a Christian.  And here I am today, after a long time of wearing that label, now no longer able to, but for completely different reasons. I'm unable to wear that label because of the vast majority of people who wear it, but for whom it means little or nothing, and the resultant damage they do to it.  Perhaps I should one day post only on why I am not a "Christian."  I am a Messianic believer; a follower of "the way," as recorded in Luke's book of Acts.

In the developed world, we have so bought into scientism and materialism. Yes, scientism, not science. What used to be scientific endeavor has eroded into finding or making up data to support political agendas, rather than seeking the truth. The squashing of intelligent design theory and the global warming hoax have proved that in spades.  The modern world is so full of people who are so thoroughly confused about real science and the scientific method, that they simply accept anything the media tells them about "news" from the world of science.  Most people simply read or hear, "Scientists said . . ." or "Study revealed . . ." and they just buy it all, lock, stock, and barrel.  Then months or years later when it is revealed that the data was misinterpreted or the methods were sloppy or the conclusions incoherent and wrong, nobody pays attention.

In keeping with Col. Bunny's question, it is interesting to note that even many of the philosophers who doubted God's existence or denied it outright, at least thought about the consequences of their ideas. They reasoned that man is a wild beast and needs to be ruled by his superiors of the same species, and that using the concept of "God" is a good way to keep the herd in line.  I wish I still had all my files with the quote from one 19th century philosopher who said that if people didn't believe in a God, the elites would need to invent one to keep the people in line.   In the times of monarchs with absolute authority, this was known as "divine right," and was useful for keeping the people cowed. Philosophers all the way back to Plato have understood that people had to have some kind of belief in a cosmic being with ultimate authority or society would break down into anarchy. Of course, past tyrants would have salivated at the modern technology we have today that could make it possible to watch and threaten the masses into near complete submission.

Many who have dislike or outright hatred of Christianity love to ask, "What about the crusades?"  Young skulls full of state propaganda from government schools are convinced that "religion" is the cause of all the world's ills. Pay no attention to the fact that it was Nazi socialism, Lenin and Stalin's communism, Mao, Pol Pot, and others who adhered to a doctrine that specifically and militantly prohibited the God of the Bible from having any part in the ordering of their societies, and executed, -- not just killed in war -- murdered upwards of 50 million people combined.  I'd like to resurrect some of those people and ask them if they would prefer living under a king who believed he would eventually have to stand before the judgment of a righteous God, or if they thought the concept of living under the Ten Commandments was just too much of a burden.

The Hitlers and the Maos and those who would be our "progressive" leaders can't tolerate any fundamental, true belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  Why?  To believe in the God of the Bible would lead to radical ideas about man being endowed by his Creator with certain unalienable rights.  People might start believing that man is not meant to be a slave to the state in order to serve the good of the masses. You true believers in the God of the Bible are a hindrance to our well-ordered society.

Life is hard. This is true for but a few buckets in the ocean of humanity. There is no system of human government which can change that fact. Not one. Whether you choose to work for material wealth like an Edison or a Ford, a Rockefeller or a Gates; or you decide to live on the streets and beg for your sustenance, life is a struggle. In a free society, men get to choose which struggle makes them happiest. In a totalitarian state, unless you are willing to lie, cheat, and murder, you will be told what struggle you will endure.

The founders of the United States may have disagreed on many doctrines of various denominations of Christianity, but they all agreed on the basics of morality as expressed in the Judeo-Christian Bible.  People like Bill Maher and others can make all the baseless claims they want to about the founders not being Christians.  A few exceptions do not alter the history as recorded in the deliberations in Congress or the federalist papers or in the personal correspondence of those founders. And I dare you to walk through Washington, D.C. and point to the words and pictures carved into the buildings and tell me that the founders didn't care about the influence of the Bible on government in the affirmative. The fact is that the overwhelming majority of the founders were indeed men of the Bible.  Dr. Benjamin Rush, signatory to the Declaration of Independence said that if the Bible ever got replaced as the basic primer for education in America, we eventually would not be able to build jails fast enough. How prophetic.  John Adams, the second president, said, "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

Something Col. Bunny alludes to but does not state specifically is that nature abhors a vacuum.  We are all going to live by somebody's set of values.  There is no such thing as a valueless society.  Muslims, and yes, I mean ALL muslims, adhere to the doctrine of their prophet Muhammed, and they can all claim various levels of adherence to the dictates of this Imam or that Imam, but when push comes to shove, and the powerful clerics who exercise the real muscle and  issue the fatwahs and direct how Sh'ria law is to be obeyed, the rest of the so-called "moderate" muslims will fall in line.  Muslims do not believe in "live and let live."  They believe that all the world is destined to be under Islam; under "submission," which is what Islam actually means.  If you are not prepared to fight to keep this ostensibly Judeo-Christian society from being overrun by muslim jihadis, then welcome to dhimmitude under an Islamic caliphate.

So, which system do you want to live under?  If you think Islam is the way to go, you can convert and move to a country which already has Sh'ria in place.  If you like the fully socialized Utopian dream, Cuba, North Korea, or Venezuela awaits you.  But how about doing the rest of us a favor and leave us alone.

Learning The Hard Way

I have so much to be thankful for.  An awareness of The Almighty God and His salvation, Yeshua.  My wife. This plot of ground and the health to work it.  Relative peace amidst a world of chaos.  Too much to list here.

If there is one thing I have to be thankful for at this time of year, it is the re-appearance of the true stories from this country's history that prove that my reason and epistemology are intact.  What God's Word says about human nature, and the laws of economics, are proven over and over again.  This proof comes in the micro and in the macro.  Scale does not change the outcome.  It can be a group of five survivors on an island or a billion Chinese.  The intentions of the participants, especially the leadership, doesn't matter.  When you work with, and put to use the laws of human nature and economics, you get mostly good results, and when you try to deny those laws and work against them, you get disaster.  John Stossel reminds of this lesson here, and following is the meat of his article.

The Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share the work and produce equally.

That's why they nearly all starved.

When people can get the same return with less effort, most people make less effort. Plymouth settlers faked illness rather than working the common property. Some even stole, despite their Puritan convictions. Total production was too meager to support the population, and famine resulted. This went on for two years.

"So as it well appeared that famine must still ensue the next year also, if not some way prevented," wrote Gov. William Bradford in his diary. The colonists, he said, "began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length after much debate of things, (I) (with the advice of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land."

In other words, the people of Plymouth moved from socialism to private farming. The results were dramatic.

"This had very good success," Bradford wrote, "for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many."  

Capitalism and free enterprise are not perfect, but only because human beings are not perfect.  The reason free enterprise -- which includes private property rights -- works, is because it works with, not against, human nature.  I've debated this issue with believers in communism or some variant thereof.  It always comes down to the fact that any form of collectivism requires force to make people conform to the ideals of that economy, thus enslaving the very people that the idea is supposed to help.  Free enterprise is completely voluntary and requires no one to participate against their will.  Their consequences are entirely of their own making.

Of course, that means they are free to fail.  It is this certainty that drives the left into fits of moonbat madness. Reality has no feelings. The laws of economics have no feelings.  They will be obeyed eventually.  You can work with them and get the most optimal outcome for the greatest average of people, or you can fight against them and end up with a horrific disaster that drags everybody down with it.

You see, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, food pantries, hospitals, The Red Cross, orphanages, and other such institutions are not started, maintained, or supported by governments, or otherwise talented or productive people who have been reduced to being slaves of the state by the "good intentions" of those who believe in socialist utopias or the fantasy of any inherent goodness of mankind.

Believers in socialism can't seem to comprehend that there will always be leaders, and that unchecked power corrupts.  They further don't understand that those who desire and strive to have the positions of power do so for their own self interest, first and foremost. The moment you forget that, you are on your way to being a slave.  The moment you fall for someone who says, "Give me this power, and I will see to it that you get this or that,"  you've begun to lose your dignity, the respect of respectable people, and your freedom.

I do understand Aesop's Fable about the dog in the manger.  I'll bet they don't touch that one in the government schools with a ten foot pole.  There really are people in this society who will gladly suffer under state imposed poverty as long as others are not allowed to become "rich."

Enough for now, I need to work on preparations for the coming economic collapse.  The people of the State of California have proved to me that it is inevitable.