SILKEN SLIPPERS AND HOBNAIL BOOTS
Surviving the Decline and Fall
by
R.E. Hannay
Copyright 2013 R.E. Hannay
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Click on Title to go direct
PART I: POLITICAL ISSUES
Silken Slippers and Hobnail Boots
Endangered Species
Earmarks and Reckless Spending
1984 Finally Arrived, 1n 2012
Disabilities and the Government
Integrity vs. Advocacy in Politics and Journalism
Urban Sprawl: Is That Bad?
The Tyranny of the Majority
If It’s Political and Sensitive, Speak Up
Liberals vs. Conservatives
Global Warming: A Comprehensive Scientific Report
The Barack Hussein Obama Legacy
The Sophomore Civics Class
Election Decisions, Slightly Simplified
Misleading Political Euphemisms
National Identification: More To Gain Than To Lose
Socialism, Fascism and Capitalism
States’ Rights and Nullification
Real Immigration Reform
Gun Control
Racial Profiling and Prejudice
PART II: ECONOMIC ISSUES
Labor Unions
How Politicians and Bureaucrats Cause Recessions
Poverty By Federal Decree
Compound Interest
Welfare’s Legal Basis
Free Enterprise
Outsourcing and Globalization
Glass Ceilings and Job Discriminating Against Women
Social Security, Simplified
U.S. Energy Independence
A Streetcar Named Undesirable
PART III: SOCIAL ISSUES
Uncivil Wars
It Takes Two Just To Make It.
Tipping 401
Masculinism and Feminism
Marriages, Non-Marriages, Virgins, Somewhats and Such
Our Fractured Families and Fractured Nation
Some Call It Sex
Up Jumped the Hippies
PART IV: INTERNATIONAL AND MILITARY ISSUES
World Peace and Our Military-Industrial Complex
The United Nations, Europe and the United States
Palestine, Zionism and Israel
Collateral Damage and Friendly Fire
Saudi Arabia: Friend Or Foe?
Ugly Americans
Wartime Internment
Japan, Land of the Whitewashed Assassins
PART V: MISCELLANEOUS ISSUES
The Rule of Law
The New Inquisition of the Bad-News Media
Health Care and the Uninsured
The War On Drugs
Survival of the Unfittest
The Right of Private Association
More Math and Science, or Better Education?
Genetic Engineering of Food
PART VI: SUMMARY
About the Author
Author's note: Since some may choose to read articles selectively rather than as a book, some redundancy was necessary to support and explain the individual subjects.
PART I: POLITICAL ISSUES
SILKEN SLIPPERS AND HOBNAIL BOOTS
History is the patter of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnail boots climbing up from below – Voltaire
This pattern has been repeated consistently since ancient times. Hungry, ambitious, aggressive nation-states have grown, prospered, and faded. America has always been the land of opportunity, an ownership nation. Now it’s a welfare state that pays people not to work, permits illegal aliens to remain and take jobs from blacks, Latinos and poor whites, gives preferential college admission and employment to people with colored skin, and takes money from more successful and productive people to give to the larger number of less successful people to buy their votes. This is the way career politicians destroy a prosperous nation and the opportunity for its productive citizens to succeed.
Franklin Roosevelt planted the seeds of America’s future decline. Instead of letting market forces correct fairly quickly the economic problems of the Great Depression, as had happened many times before, he injected large-scale welfare programs and economic meddling, lengthening the depression by seven years. It eventually ended when the war in Europe brought military business to the U.S. and we started building up our own weak military forces.
World War II energized our country and the post-war economy prospered with pent-up consumer demand, new family formations and general hustling. Then Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, aided by politicians, revived and expanded Roosevelt’s social engineering and fiscal policies that hamper free-market prosperity, penalizing success and rewarding failure.
The great communicator, President Reagan, was able to bypass the politicians and convince the people that “government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem.” Reagan lowered top income tax rates from 70 percent to 28 percent, but total tax revenues actually increased with the lower rates. Carter’s stagflation was corrected in two years and the country prospered for another 25 years.
But starting with the first President Bush, each new president, aided by Congress, raised taxes and increased spending, added or expanded a large collection of new regulatory agencies and “programs” – EPA, OSHA, food stamps and a hundred other major federal bureaucracies. As Milton Friedman noted, “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program." The principle is concentrated benefits for a small, organized lobby that seeks some benefit, with diffused costs paid by unorganized or unaware taxpayers who don’t oppose the pork.
Occasionally our relentless progress toward a stagnant welfare state has slowed. On President Clinton’s watch, congressional Republicans twice passed welfare reform legislation, requiring recipients to do public work. Clinton vetoed it twice, but faced with an election and public support for the third legislation, he signed it, vowing to repeal it later. When it became very successful, cutting welfare rolls in half, he claimed credit for the legislation and the liberal news media called it “Clinton’s welfare reform.” Unfortunately, since then Obama and Congress have almost destroyed that successful reform.
One disastrous social engineering effort was the promotion of more home ownership, which instead resulted in an unsustainable housing bubble. It started with Carter’s Community Redevelopment Act, which forced mortgage lenders to make loans in blighted areas where lending was not good business practice. Carter punished lenders who didn’t make what his regulators decreed were enough bad loans. Clinton and Bush 43 added more vote-buying programs to increase home ownership. To make that happen, FHA, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae lowered credit standards and down payments, eventually permitting some loans with no down payments, no verification of borrowers’ employment and income, and without checking the borrower’s credit history, encouraging people to buy houses they couldn’t afford.
The Federal Reserve facilitated the politicians’ housing bubble by printing large amounts of fiat money and holding interest rates artificially low. Rising housing prices attracted speculation, with speculators often buying several houses and “flipping” them even before they were completed. Wall Street bundled these mortgages for sale to investors, rating agencies (who were paid by the packagers) rated the shaky mortgage securities AAA and great quantities were sold to banks and investment firms around the world.
/> In 2008 the big investment bank Lehman Brothers folded and the bubble was pricked. Panicky Bush 43 and Congress, like all politicians, had to “do something”, instead of just correcting bad lending practices and monetary policy, and letting market forces restore sanity to the housing market. They created $800 billion with the Fed’s printing press and borrowed from China and others to save the politically connected, “too-big-to-fail” banks, securities brokers and insurance companies, starting the spending frenzy “to save the economy,” which it didn’t.
Then in 2009 Barack Hussein Obama, an inexperienced community rabble rouser, showed up at the carnival and we were off on the race to the bottom. He spent another $833 billion for emergency “shovel-ready” projects that still weren’t ready years later. He gave that money, Chicago-style, to friends, failing projects, windmill manufacturers, unions, and to Brazil to drill for oil while not issuing pending permits that were badly needed for drilling in this country.
Five years later the country still has a stagnant economy, with revised methods of calculating official statistics concealing high unemployment and inflation. If unemployment were calculated the way it was formerly, Obama’s 7.6 percent number for June, 2013 would be 23.4 percent, according to Shadow Stats. From the October, 2012 Financial Intelligence Report: “The official August, 2013 inflation rate was 1.69 percent. Using 1980 methodology, the August rate was 9.3 percent ... As the underlying reality has turned more sour, the Obama White House has gone further than any of its predecessors toward converting U.S. economic reporting into an exercise in fiction-writing.”
Aided by the "news" media, the Democrats now engage in full-time, all-year, every-year political campaigning, not on issues but in convincing gullible segments of the voting public – blacks, Latinos, single women, young people, the unemployed, the “working people” - that the Republicans and the greedy, heartless businesses that are the engine that drives the economy and the only source of real jobs, are their enemies and must be punished, not encouraged. Businesses and successful people have alternatives. Hostess Bakeries is a typical case. With heavy losses and facing a second bankruptcy, the company had to reduce high labor costs. Offered an eight percent wage reduction, 92 percent of their union workers rejected it and voted to strike. Hostess simply closed their 36 U.S. plants and fired their 18,500 workers.
Obama’s National Labor Relations Board puppets tried to punish Boeing for opening a plant in right-to-work South Carolina. Obama’s relentless attacks on business result in businesses and individuals not hiring or making capital investments or expansions, with some of them closing, retiring or moving themselves or their businesses overseas where taxes, labor costs and government policies are more favorable and unreasonable regulations and taxes are understood to be fatal to prosperity.
The U.S. continues to borrow by selling more Treasurys, the Fed continues to print more “money” to buy most of them and also to buy bad mortgage loans, the deficits continue to accumulate at close to $1 trillion annually, the national debt now exceeds $17 trillion, and the Roman circus continues its performance.
Those ultimately responsible for America’s downfall are not Obama and his toadys. It is a parasitic voting public, wanting the government to care for them at the expense of others, voters who re-elected a failed, incompetent gang of Chicago machine politicians and their limousine-liberal, elitist partners, people determined to change prosperity into a stagnant welfare state of people dependent on the career politicians. Our prosperity has been based on equal opportunity for all. Now the liberals strive for equal outcomes for all, killing incentives to produce and succeed. The majority of the voters were more interested in their bribes from the government than their own opportunities and the country’s prosperity. With more people riding on the wagon than pulling it, it is likely that more pullers will just say “Nuts!” and become riders themselves, head for the golf course, the beach in Panama or move their business to Asia.
Obama and many Democrats are shouting “Compromise!” at the Republicans, but compromise to the Obama gang means, “You compromise!” And that means one more step down the slippery slope to ancient Rome and modern Greece. The something-for-nothing voters have chosen to let their opportunity nation be dismantled, following an incompetent Pied Piper toward stagnant socialism, savings-destroying inflation and national bankruptcy. It is painful to remember what happened to Rome and realize it is happening here.