We have crossed the Rubicon. There’s no going back. America is no longer land of the free and home of the brave, rather the land of the dependent and home of wimps. As Claire Wolfe put it years ago, “America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.”
While all the pundits pontificate about why the Right got trounced and the GOP searches for ways to reach out to demographic groups it lost in large numbers, the fact remains that the United States of freeloaders just voted themselves another four years of freebies. Birth control for everyone! Free healthcare! More trains! Free housing! Free education! Obamaphones!
The slick, snake oil salesman convinced the masses that the rich people will pay for all of it while the drones marched en masse to the drum of dependence. Free and dumb won the day. Everyone knows it’s not free except the dumb ones and they now outnumber the rest of us.
Don’t be sad or angry. We all knew it was coming like the eventual heart attack or Diabetes that comes from eating a constant diet of cake and ice cream washed it down with sodas. When someone morbidly obese suddenly keels over and dies, is anyone ever surprised? Why does no one ever say, “Yep, saw that one coming,”?
The United States of America is no different. The symptoms are clear: Declining morality, dependence on government at every level, ignorance of history, massive spending and debt, public apathy towards politics and civics, ever-increasing regulation, and the list goes on.
A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.
These words were attributed to Alexander Tytler, a Scottish professor, but their authorship remains in question. The truth contained in them does not.
Although the American form of government is a constitutional republic, that concept went out the window years ago. For all intents and purposes, we now have a democracy. Even our founders feared its inevitability. When asked at the end Constitutional Convention, what form of government we had, Benjamin Franklin quipped, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Sorry Dr. Franklin, it appears that we could not.
The question remains. Where do we go from here?
If according to Tytler, the next step is a dictatorship then when will that point come? We are already there. There is not a single dictator in the classic sense, but rather federal, state, and local dictators who control nearly everything in our lives from the kind of cars produced, to the light bulbs in our homes, to our health care, to how much money we can keep after we earn it or even when we die, to what we can do with our land or put in our bodies.
Also attributed to Tytler is the cycle of self rule: “From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”
Can anyone argue that we are not in the last stages when over half the country is dependent on government assistance and the numbers are growing rapidly? That point was made clear when I witnessed a reporter covering the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy comment to the effect that residents were frustrated that FEMA had not yet arrived after three days. That’s dependence and bondage my friends.
For those of you wondering what collapse will look like, look no further than what people are doing for a gallon of gas after Hurricane Sandy. Imagine what the free and dumb crowd will do when the dollar becomes worthless, the government is unable to take care of them and they are starving. Welcome to the dependence and bondage phase, the last stop on the democracy train.
Buckle your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Image: courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/whoisthatwithrachel/310587603/;Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
