Monthly Archives: February 2020

Culture, Economics, Education, Politics 2020, Representation, Responsibility, Taxation

BACK TO THE FUTURE

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It seems Prudent to pray.  Humans have an urge to worship, whether unto a deity of the personal perception of each supplicant, or to a set of deities connected to important natural phenomena like trees, rains, sunlight, moonlight, stars, winds, lightning, high and low temperatures… and more. 

If not truly worshipped, natural aspects of locales are generally respected with some attribution of supernatural importance, power or influence.  Caves, mountains, bodies of water, great forests and vital rivers are considered more than just natural by populations on whose lives they have life-giving or life-threatening influence.  Whether the Holy Spirit or the Great Spirit of native tribes, life’s continuous foibles, phenomena, fertility, feelings, fears and finality cause humans in every kind of society to come to terms with what can’t be controlled through forms of spirituality or religious faith.

What does it mean to all of those who claim to have no attachment to any church, religion or spiritual belief structure?  There are many and the number grows as government schools and liberal-leftist guided private schools divest themselves of morality and other quasi-biblical philosophies.  Only “science” can satisfy agnostics and atheists, those so declared tell anyone who’ll listen.  Religions are “mumbo-jumbo.”  So certain of their cold, scientific facts are many atheists, that they feel compelled to prevent any expression of religion or faith or spirituality.  The Prudent observer might think that they protest too much.  Their innate need to worship something is simply satisfied in a different way.

An argument can be made that Socialism is the secular faith, as it were.  Those who believe in this “ism,” must take its tenets on faith, since there is no empirical evidence that Socialism has worked anywhere.  Yet they work tirelessly to impose socialism so that individuality and human nature are replaced with the collectivist ethos, and innate capitalism is replaced with Utopian premises of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”  A lot of faith is required to believe such ideas in the face of utter failure in every example.

Inevitably, Socialism devolves into tyranny.  In place of “guided honesty” of free individuals, Socialism is required to impose rules for correct behavior, and they inevitably become very granular.  The logical concerns we have about the American administrative state are genuine fears about a Socialist bureaucracy that is charged with imposing a statist conformity on large populations.  Although a modern socialist state might refrain from police-state status, today’s technology empowers social engineers to gather voluminous data that help identify non-conforming citizens, whose lack of adherence to rules threatens, or are perceived to threaten, the health and safety of the group/collective for whom the state exists and is dedicated.

Power, ultimately, and before very long, concentrates in the hands of the higher echelons of bureaucracies.

Also logically, politics within socialist systems can’t be allowed to offer significant opposition to the functioning bureaucracy.  There is a certain necessity to promoting, educating about, proving and re-proving a high level of infallibility of the state.  The benign nature of the system that all benefit from and must support, has no room for serious opposition to its own quality.  Calling socialist leadership into question is simply anathema to the established rules of conformity.  Freedom and socialism are essentially antithetical.  There is no need for freedom when “everybody” already benefits from the state.

The reactions to freedom and independent sovereignty can be seen in the United States today.  Wherever the premises of socialism/atheism are challenged by Christians, in particular, the socialist response is most often anger: the public face of hatred.  If any question of this set of observations remains, just consider the nature of angry reaction to Trump and to any of his supporters.  Hatred.

For every form of governance and social cohesion, there is a beginning and some sort of end-game.  Given the ubiquitous factor of human nature, which is fundamentally, personally, independent and capitalistic, in the sense of retaining the products of one’s labor – the whole “private property” thing – the founding of the United States did the best job yet in history, to craft a Constitution and the original institutions that, in the hands of both faithful and honest officials, judges and democratically elected representatives, might survive the tyrannical tendencies it was designed to oppose.

From the beginning, the desires of some for power over others, for self aggrandizement and for monopoly economic advantage, have been trying to erode the bases of liberty.  As the philosophies of tyranny also matured, the description of socialism as the utopian supplantation of capitalism, and thereby of individual freedom, caught the interest of those who already hated the chaos of freedom as much as they distrusted the unity of thought that resulted from religious faith.  Any system of human organization that did not need the guidance of the state, was/is to be discredited and destroyed.  And so it has gone since at least the (second) Civil War.  Never let a crisis go to waste.

The blind faith in socialism is not so dissimilar to religious faith: life-changing belief in something that can’t be seen, and acceptance of various scriptures.  On the other hand, but in the same way, erstwhile conservatives show blind faith in unregulated capitalism, as if human nature were fulfilled by monopoly, government-protected wealth concentration, and as if the super-rich billionaire class were going to become benign rich uncles to us, all.  There is foolishness aplenty to go around… the world.

Rather than thinking with our human-nature selfishness, a little statesmanship is the better prescription.  We need, first, to recognize that these, again, are the times that try men’s souls.  At the founding of the independence struggle, those who signed the Declaration of Independence were placing their support for what was a civil war, not truly a revolution, out in the public eye, making themselves primary targets for the British military fighting to hold the American part of the British Kingdom tightly to England.  It took phenomenal courage, as they pledged their “… lives, fortunes and sacred honor.”

Where is sacred honor, today, as we face the United States’ greatest enemy: the failure of belief in the American Dream?  Where are the statesmen and women who will risk everything to restore America’s path?  There is no question that stepping back from the brink of tyranny – from the brink of unfathomable debt – will be quite unpleasant, uncomfortable, unpredictable and will require a continuity of leadership we have not seen since Lincoln and Washington.  It will not be possible for Americans to work 30 and 35-hour weeks, take multiple vacations each year, and waste as much income on frivolous, games, goodies or fattening foods.  Everyone will have to sacrifice.

Especially governments.

The federal budget must be rendered $1 Trillion smaller.  Sounds easy when the number is so even and simply stated.  A trillion… a thousand billion dollars.  In none of our lifetimes have we seen a congress cut – as in spend less money this year than was spent last fiscal year – ANY federal office or program, without spending much more elsewhere.

Local governments would have to assume the absolutely essential social services, and forego multiple other demands… demands like raises, fancy equipment, landscaping that isn’t done voluntarily, new school buildings and numerous non-essential municipal jobs.  States will find cutting even more difficult, since all those unionized state employees are the same people whose families donate to and work for campaigns.  Plus, there’s all that graft on enormous public works.  No more $750,000 state university presidents in those days, either.

None of these politically unlikely changes will happen, of course, until a far greater hurdle is crossed: making everyone, both parties, and everyone else, public and private, believe that eliminating debt-based government is more important than all of everyone’s private concerns.  More than during any war-time mobilization, Americans will have to agree to the importance of national sacrifice… to the importance of living within our means, Constitutionally, and with added sacrifice to pay off all of our loans.

There is no other path to financial freedom and strength.  Every dollar of debt is a loss of independence; every dollar in taxes is a loss of freedom.  Can we strike the correct balance going forward?  – the balance between independence, freedom and responsibility?  – the balance envisioned in our founding that relied upon morality and personal responsibility?

Or shall we succumb to the blandishments of socialist, identity politics, and hollow promises of greater freedom through national controls?  Shall we continue down a path that promises the slow loss of all we hold dear in America… slow, until one day we lose everything that’s left, abruptly, cataclysmically, destructively, unrecoverably?  We hope we know when that will be, but we don’t.  We hope we can pull back from the brink before all is lost, based on some arcane calculations that, literally, no one knows how to make.

Will the path to sanity commence before the next election?  Not bloody likely.  What about after the next election?  Well, not until all the other spending promises are fulfilled, and by then it will be mid-term elections and there’s no way in Hell those congressional giants are going to bear the brunt of mismanagement long before THEY were first elected.

Culture, Economics, Education, Governance, Health Care, Obama, Politics 2020, Responsibility

Corona, corona

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Corona beer comes from yeast, not a virus.
there is no connection whatsoever…

There are people who believe that the latest health threat to emanate from China is caused or somehow made contagious by Corona Beer, a well-known health threat from Mexico.  It is on this canvas that the gloppy acrylics of impeachment, economics, presidential politics, petro-dollar monetary policy, Antifa, Hezbollah, North Korea, opioid deaths and suicides, and the real threat of coronavirus must create a picture that is both truthful and meaningful to majorities in dozens of countries including our own.  Whew!  There are 15 national leaders whose views and beliefs about these and other issues, will define the next ten years and beyond: Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Angela Merkel, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ali Khamenei, Kim Jung Un, Xi Jinping, Ram Nath Kovind, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Volodymyr Zelensky (who at least has a sense of humor), Arif Alvi (who doesn’t), and both last and least, Nicolás Maduro, who is an idiot.

Mixed up in all of their opinions is the existence of American constitutionalism, our ostensible structure of rights and freedoms, and our unbalanced, imperial economy.  Our primary concern must be the survival of the United States and freedom itself.  What presidential politics does every four years is stir us enough to reflect on our beliefs about our nation and our country, not the same things.

Democrat hotheads, committed to control of… well, everything, have impeached Trump to no good end, although his acquittal was never in real doubt.  No good end, certainly, but the disinformation value of, first Mueller, and then impeachment itself, must appear to elected Democrat leaders as a worthy end nevertheless.  Those who now shy away from bottled Corona most assuredly cling to bottled hatreds, known and unknown, but felt viscerally.  So there is the worthiness of relentless hatred of the aforementioned Mr. Trump.

There should be little disagreement with the proposition that hatred is the worst basis for political competition, yet hatred is everywhere employed in the United States, of all places.  Hatred doesn’t develop automatically.  Fear does: it’s pure ethnocentrism, even “racism,” per se.  But racism and fear of difference are not hatred.  Hatred is a visceral desire to kill or destroy the “other.”  To fear or to mistrust a stranger – or a strange “culture” – is instinctive and need not be taught.  To HATE  that person or group requires coaching, teaching, explanation and mythology.  It’s a long-term, methodical process to convert fear to hatred.  Who does crap like that?

Here and there are parents who were, themselves, taught to hate certain others and to varying degrees manage to convince their children to also hate them.  But it’s not as easy to do in the modern era, as public schools, ostensibly, fight the urge to bully or to gang-up on the unusual or most defenseless kids.  To some degree, children receiving messages of hatred at home are going to hear enough lessons countering that prejudice, that fewer and fewer reach early adulthood with firm hatreds.

Yet, now we have a split electorate, fueled by the sweet lies of socialists (people complain about Trump’s looseness with the truth but never a peep about the absolute and historical bullshit spread in the name of socialism).  A virtual communist is at or near the front of the pack in the ostensible “Democrat” party’s campaign for nomination to the presidency, and giddy polls regularly trumpet the acceptance of “socialism” by millenials.  There are reasons to fear Bernie Sanders’ cry for “transformation” of the United States, just as there were for the stated intentions of Barack Obama to “fundamentally transform” the United States.

Consider just the “ACA,” Affordable Care Act, which was not “affordable,” whatever that was hoped to mean, and it wasn’t about “care,” particularly: it was about coverage, the perpetual stumbling bloc to health care.  The nature of every “coverage” entity, whether “insurance” companies and HMO’s or governmental agencies that both regulate and directly pay actual care providers, is to reduce costs.  The main difficulties inherent in the ACA-expanded coverage industry were made worse and more expensive, nearly removing people from decision-making while nearly removing physicians and others from caring about their customers.

These sorts of change ought to be anathema to citizens of a nation with the heritage of the United States.  Our mythos is founded in individualism, self-made success, pioneering advancement into unexplored territories, and homesteads created even where the only building material was prairie turf.  Somehow the steady erosion of socialist promises of “free” safety and comfort have weakened the resolve of Americans to take control of their lives and circumstances, and to do so responsibly.

(See:
http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2017/01/16/health-care-fairness-and-free-enterprise/

Obama also made substantial changes to our foreign relations and to our ability to control events to our benefit, rather to enhance the influence and strength of Muslim regimes.  Fundamental transformation.  Here in 2020 these same intentions are voiced repeatedly by Bernie Sanders and others whose vision is not to improve or “perfect” our union, but to replace our form of government by altering Constitutional institutions and original rights.  The “new” goals are not comprised of strengthening liberty, but to “set” everyone’s standard of living so that no one is “above” his fellow residents: ultimate “fairness,” a new form of political organization that removes the interference in individual beliefs by churches, and in which every sort of human pleasure-seeking will be permitted… by benign elites, and, perhaps, taught in public schools.

The struggle of socialism is never-ending.  While “we” in the American, Judeo-Christian traditions of individual liberty and responsibility tend to assume our battle for freedom is won… and done, globalist socialism never rests on its continuum of undermining and destroying liberty and faithfulness.  It is a continuum that extends back to the “Garden of Eden.” 

“What?” you say, “nothing Prudent about that silly claim.”

Well, a few terms we don’t think about enough: Thesis – The Word of God, or the first premise; Antithesis – Direct opposition to the Word of God; Synthesis – Human-generated, pretended, compromise position with the Word of God.  The synthesis becomes the new Premise, no longer the Word of God, something less.  Is this not exactly what the “Serpent” offered to Eve, assuring her that God’s threat to not eat of the tree in the midst (center) of the Garden, or touch it “…,lest thou die.” would not come true.  “thou shalt not surely die.” the serpent told her.  God issued the thesis to Not eat of the tree; Serpent offered the antithesis  that the punishment would not be death (at least not right away) and the rewards of knowledge were worth the chance.  Is this process any more or less than the Hegelian dialectic?  Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis.  Abortion is no longer murder; socialism will create a better America than God did.