[History suggests the Republican Congress won’t hold the line on fiscal policy and will instead pursue their own priorities regardless of mounting debt b]ecause we live in a world that has lost touch with the very idea of hard choices. That even in the richest and most prosperous country in the world, you still have to choose one or the other. That you can't have [your] cake and eat it too. . . . Soon there are no choices, only options.Mr. Greenberg believes this flaccidity shows an “intellectual degeneracy” that has led us to throw away our wealth and power “in order to gain Communism” at the same time that the Chinese all but gave up communism to acquire wealth and power. In our degenerate state “we traded a system that worked for one that didn't.”
Our government has vanished into that haze. A haze in which our leaders actually believe that we can be tough and kind, strong and beloved and spending as much as we want without worrying about where it's coming from. The haze extends to our policies which assume that we can win wars without offending anyone, and spend as much money as we want without recouping it in some way. In a system built on . . . two party stalemates usually broken by compromises, it's all too easy to believe that you can give and take, without ever having to choose. One or the other.[1]
We reached a fatal milestone during the 1930s when FDR and the Democrats embraced central planning and mounted a full-scale assault on capitalism, the engine that had produced untold wealth for Americans and placed us in the first rank of world powers. The New Deal is a testament to the futility of deficit spending and other forms of excessive or improper government interference in economic matters but few Americans think of as other than the very instrument of the salvation of capitalism. The burden of government expenditures and debt have risen inexorably since then and the Republicans when last in control showed themselves to be as useless and grasping as any Democrat when it came to spending public money and racking up debt.
In the not-too-distant past I remember politicians declaring that they would slow “the rate of growth of spending” with a straight face. Also, the idea has been discussed for decades that one or more political leaders might or should “move to the center” or take a “centrist” position when the actual center between dependency and independence, between statism and liberty, is a good three days’ march from our collective right shoulder. “The center” in the accepted argot of the day is actually between hard left statism and a sickly Ripon Society “rightism” at best or a doughy RINO commitment to temporary hiring freezes in the Dept. of Education and resolute enforcement of the Paperwork Reduction Act at worst. Compromise only sets the stage for another compromise, which is, of course, cost free and the next stage after any one or any 100 compromises is never tyranny. Never that. Didn't we read somewhere that we're "exceptional." That will protect us.
The fiscal and debt problems that we have, and that Europe has to an even greater degree, are all symptoms of the fact that socialism in any form is not a sustainable model once the debt burden rises high enough and the economies in question no longer have the enormous productivity that they did in the early years after WWII. (Actually, it's never sustainable. It just becomes manifestly so when this happens.) In short, the strategy of massive social welfare spending fueled by (1) high taxes, (2) excessive borrowing, and (3) importation of huge numbers of foreigners from incompatible cultures to delay the inevitable bankruptcy of those welfare schemes, is not a system that “works.”
In the U.S., we have abandoned constitutional government by refusing any longer to enforce federalism and acquiescing in blatantly dishonest Supreme Court interpretations of the Commerce Clause and its fantastical discovery of a constitutional right to abortion in the Fourteenth Amendment. These two provisions of the now-regnant “Living Constitution” have utterly destroyed the Constitution that was the glory of the 18th century and the guarantee that we could live as free men and women. Every one of us by our silence and acquiescence in this tragic state of affairs is an active supporter of the intellectual degeneracy of our time. We have settled for sloth, diversions, and expediency.
It is particularly egregious for that Americans and the rest of the Western world to to embrace socialism that at every moment of its existence draws closer and closer to total control over us -- that threatens at all times to turn into that form of "socialism in a hurry" that someone has aptly said characterizes communism -- and at the same time (1) fail to demand an accounting from the mass murders of communism and (2) fail to distance themselves from the lies and oppression that are the essence of every form of socialism and communism.
The communist Pol Pot, when a student in France, said he wanted to create a perfect democracy in Cambodia but instead created a hell on earth. But Westerners still give credence to the idea that America’s involvement in the Vietnam War led to the killing fields so beloved of the Khmer Rouge instead of communist depravity. And we still pursue the Will-o’-the-Wisp of the security and comfort we think is to be found in socialism and reward and admire the traitors whose lives have meaning to them only to the extent they can defame and undermine this greatest of civilizations. And can give aid and comfort to all manner of enemies, foreign and domestic, enemies whose every breath is antithetical to the values of the West.
The Western world has found the veritable all-weather superhighway of self-deception to carry it to oblivion, and if you doubt that think of the gutless dedication to “compromise” that the majority of our leaders demonstrate every time they open their mouths. And our willingness to return to office men like John McCain and Harry Reid -- and every member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Notes
[1] "Outside the Territory of Reason ." By Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish, 12/6/10 (emphasis added).
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