Sunday, May 23, 2010

A Trend to Disaster

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It is often useful to attempt to look at the big picture, and try to ignore the day to day panics of the media.  Stepping back from current events, here is one large trend I see:

For many years, really dating back to the 1960's, there has been a worldwide trend to pay people more and more for doing nothing.  More pensions, more vacation time, shorter work weeks, larger unemployment payments, more welfare payments -- all mandated by government law and government funding, which really means of course that those actually working are paying for it either through taxes or in monetary inflation.

Now we even have "free" health care coming, which really means health care that costs more overall, paid for by those who work.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Europe.  In Greece, most of the economy is the government itself.  Government and union workers are paid for 14 months for every 12 months they work.  In addition, they have large amounts of paid vacation time per year, and are guaranteed large pensions and early retirement.  Their productivity is so low, few Greek products would be competitive on the world stage.  But subsidies from the government make them competitive.

Not surprisingly this Greek economic Ponzi scheme has collapsed.  And the US is now helping to foot the bill, assuring that Greek civil servants continue to have their large pensions and paid vacation, and early retirement etc.  So the working people of the US will  now be paying Greeks not to work, on into the future.

But what happens when the whole world economic shell game collapses?  The collapse of course will be blamed on greedy Wall Street, not on government policies that give people money for not working -- just as 0bama continues to blame Wall Street "greed" for the 2008 collapse. It was actually caused very simply by poor loan underwriting that was a direct result of government mandates to artificially provide homes to people who could not pay for them.  Wall Street simply tried to sell off the bad loans.  Everyone assumed that the government -- through Fannie Mae, etc., would guarantee them as promised.  Surprise:  They didn't, because they couldn't come up with the huge amount of cash to do so.  I believe the total number of bad loans is at almost $50 trillion.

(Note that the current Financial Regulatory Reform Bill does absolutely nothing to address the true cause of the 2008 collapse.  Nothing.  Nothing at all.)

This is all consistent with the Cloward-Piven strategy which states that people should be given so many government benefits and guarantees that when they inevitably cannot be provided, a series of crises and interventions ensues, with each one larger than the last.  These crises then cause the collapse of the capitalist rule book, which can then be replaced with the socialist one.

Cloward and Piven neglect to describe what happens then, but my take is that the final result is poverty, starvation, and world war.  Complete collapse of civilized behavior and indeed civilization itself  is likely.

Again I must ask:  If 0bama was purposefully attempting to destroy the US, what would he be doing differently?
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