On Growing a Great Nation
I watched Gov. Romeny’s speech this morning on Oct. 8. It was a great speech, not a perfect speech, but a great speech, nevertheless. It was informative and inspiring. He started me thinking again. Yes, we need a leader that can and will encourage a vibrant economy. And No, President Obama has no clue how to do that. It appears his only domestic plan is to help the poor stay poor. There is some improvement in our economy, but as this President said, “You did not build that, someone else built that for you.” No Mr. President, You did not do that, we did that. The American people are very resilient, knock us down, and we will bounce back up. The attack on Pearl Harbor is a great example of our bounce.
Governments produce nothing. You might make the case that roads are a product of government; at least when they are finished there is material good left over for the use by society. Government, by its nature, is a consumer. It takes resources, (the assets: material goods, money, energy, etc.) out of a society and uses it up. For example, it is typical that for every dollar received by our government, roughly 2/3 of it gets eaten up by government itself. Roughly 1/3 of the assets it confiscates from its people get back into the hands of non-government people. I saw a sign somewhere that said something like this, “If you put this government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there would be a shortage of sand. Amen.
We have $84 Trillion in US assets, $121 T in unfunded liabilities + $16 T of national debt = $137 T in liabilities for a current ratio of .61; not a good number. Today, if we took all our assets, – i.e. all the money and property from all the people in the USA, ($84 Trillion) it would not be enough to cover our national financial obligations of $137,000,000,000,000. That’s Trillions of Dollars. America is essentially broke, we own nothing, it is all mortgaged, to the tune of $137,000,000,000,000. You and all the people you know or have ever known, counting 24/7 as fast as you could, with $1,000 bills, could not count that high in all your lives put together.
We are in over our heads. In this case 8.4 feet tall standing in 13.7 feet of water wearing 20 lb. ankle boots on each foot. If you could walk to shallow enough water in 25 seconds, you might survive, but the prospects are not good.
God said, “Owe no man anything …” (Rom 13:8) Debt is bad. But the interest on debt is a cancer eating away the society from the inside, eating away ever more as it *grows* and *grow*s and grows, eventually leaving not enough working parts to survive. The organism then dies, its people are devastated and even destroyed. If you support parasitic governance, if you have your hand out to get stuff, you will suffer a consequence as it little by little consumes you and those around you. Like cancer, for a while you feel OK, but as the internal parasites eat up your life sustaining resources – you will grow weaker and eventually have no life left in you, dead but not yet buried. That has always been the case when more and more people discover an easy way to sustain themselves at the expense of others. Sooner or later there are not enough others.
You could say that the nanny government cannibalizes the resources of the children in its care, us. The bigger the government, the bigger the appetite. It is really disgusting. In the case of our government, it takes not only the resources of today’s children, but it takes the resources of generations to come through massive debt. And those in charge of our government think that it is OK to destroy the future of our grandchildren.
Mankind is basically lazy. The difference between one lazy person and another is what they do about our laziness. Some submit and become not much more than a dent in the couch. Others resist to some degree or other and some even become work-a-holics. Put yourself into that scale. Where do you fit between a dent-in-the-couch and a work-a-holic?
If you were the only person within a 2,000 mile radius, you would be absolutely responsible for the maintenance of your existence. No work, no eat. If someone should come into your sphere of influence, you would still have that responsibility to self maintain, but you would have the opportunity share the work for the “mutual benefit of each”. If ten or fifty people show up, the responsible for the maintenance of your existence does not change, only the opportunity to spread the work load around changes for the mutual benefit of each. But, no one has the right to sit under a sycamore tree and sip an ice tea while everybody else works. The responsibility remains the same. That does not mean that we cannot help some get going, teaching them that which they need to self sustain. We can even shelter them while they are learning. But learn they must do as a condition of being helped. No able bodied / able minded person has a right to unlimited sustenance from others. The sustained must give something in return to those who sustain. Reciprocity is always appropriate, often required. It is clear, when we put together many of his comments, that Obama thinks that there is a large bowl of wealth for the world to share, and to the extent that some have more, others will have less, There are many in the liberal community who think that way. Well, “Bah, humbug”. Every society/nation has its own bowl. Their bowl will have more or less according to how much wealth they create to put in it, by how much wealth they produce minus how much they consume. The only way to have more wealth in the bowl is to consume less than produced. That is just basic common sense. Government is always a consumer, a parasite that lives off the backs of its people. (Parasite – an organism that lives at the expense of its host.)
Since J.M. Keynes proposed the idea that governments could and should use debt based financing rather than asset based financing, adopted by virtually all the governments now in financial distress, their people have less opportunity for growth and productivity. Growth means there is more in the bowl than in the previous period. Their abundance is greater so to speak, the society is producing more for itself and is storing, selling or trading the surplus for a benefit to themselves and their progeny.
Every dollar taken by government from its people is a depletion of its resources and is a dollar that is not available to its people for their growth and productivity. Every dollar used by government is a dollar not available for use by its people for the improvement of a dynamic society. We are each either productive, consumptive, or counter-productive. We must be a productive people in order to maintain an abundant life for our people.