Daily Archives: Dec 7, 2011

View 704 Wednesday, December 07, 2011

Pearl Harbor Day

I remember hearing President Roosevelt on the radio that morning. I was eight years old.

President Obama has made it clear that this will be a pivotal election.

[snip] But, Osawatomie, this is not just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time.  This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class.  Because what’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, secure their retirement. 

[snip] Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune.  “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us.  If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes — especially for the wealthy — our economy will grow stronger.  Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers.  But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else.  And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, well, that’s the price of liberty.

Now, it’s a simple theory.  And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government.  That’s in America’s DNA.  And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker.  (Laughter.)  But here’s the problem:  It doesn’t work.  It has never worked.  (Applause.)  It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression.  It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ‘50s and ‘60s.  And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade.  (Applause.)  I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory.  
Remember in those years, in 2001 and 2003, Congress passed two of the most expensive tax cuts for the wealthy in history.  And what did it get us?  The slowest job growth in half a century.  Massive deficits that have made it much harder to pay for the investments that built this country and provided the basic security that helped millions of Americans reach and stay in the middle class — things like education and infrastructure, science and technology, Medicare and Social Security.  
Remember that in those same years, thanks to some of the same folks who are now running Congress, we had weak regulation, we had little oversight, and what did it get us?  Insurance companies that jacked up people’s premiums with impunity and denied care to patients who were sick, mortgage lenders that tricked families into buying homes they couldn’t afford, a financial sector where irresponsibility and lack of basic oversight nearly destroyed our entire economy. 

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-text-obama-speech-kansas-20111206,0,4426647.story?track=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+latimes%2Fnews%2Fpolitics+%28L.A.+Times+-+Politics%29

What we need, according to President Obama, is more regulation and more government to “level the playing field,” which translates into wealth redistribution. He doesn’t address the problem of what happens when you run out of wealth to redistribute.

Meanwhile, government spending rises exponentially. A Supercommittee charged with reducing the deficit by $1.4 Trillion over ten years. The projected deficit for those ten years adds up to more than $4 Trillion. Had the Supercommittee done its job, the deficit would have continued to rise, but not quite so fast.

We still continue to borrow money to disperse to the poor. If the deficits continue to rise – and this is inevitable since there is no proposal simply to stop borrowing money and spend only what we take in – the amount we pay in debt service will rise. That money will go to someone. If we have raised taxes and confiscated domestic wealth, we will have no one to borrow from in the United States. That means more and more of what we produce will leave the country. We can hope it will return as investment, but if so, the profits will go to – well, to whom?

What we have projected is increased spending to cover more and more of the expenses of the population. Houses, medical care, retirement, food — but I don’t need to go into all that. Tocqueville did it quite well a long time ago.

It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. I do not question that, in an age of instruction and equality like our own, sovereigns might more easily succeed in collecting all political power into their own hands and might interfere more habitually and decidedly with the circle of private interests than any sovereign of antiquity could ever do. But this same principle of equality which facilitates despotism tempers its rigor. We have seen how the customs of society become more humane and gentle in proportion as men become more equal and alike. When no member of the community has much power or much wealth, tyranny is, as it were, without opportunities and a field of action. As all fortunes are scanty, the passions of men are naturally circumscribed, their imagination limited, their pleasures simple. This universal moderation moderates the sovereign himself and checks within certain limits the inordinate stretch of his desires.

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/ch4_06.htm

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

And President Obama is correct. “…this is not just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. “

Tuesday was devoured by locusts, but I am slowly catching up. I have also been working on fiction, and Eric and my friends are getting a number of older works to go up as Kindle editions. I am putting together a lot of notes on Anvil, which is more and more looking like a story of how to save a nation. We’ll see. Thanks for your renewals and subscriptions.

On that score, the biggest holdup in getting some of the old stuff up as eBooks is covers. I am not artistic and I don’t do cover designs. I did pick a couple of on-line pictures and bought them for some of what’s up, and Reck Hellewell and some of my other advisors came up with some of what’s there, and my agent took care of the ones that she has put up, but I don’t really have a solution to the cover problem. Incidentally, if you find glitches in any of my Kindle books, tell me so we can get them fixed. Amazon allows all those who have bought a book to download updates if the author has copies fixed. I’ve done that with a couple of them.

The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog, a new online database of habitable worlds