Welcome to Looter-Moocher Land

Welcome to Looter-Moocher Land

Eric Paul Nolte

 

 Here in the Land of Plunder, it is beginning to look a lot like Christmas.  Lots of goodies to eat ... hmm, or is that loot to eat for the moocher class?  Or is this the ancient Norse legend of Gotterdaemmerung, the prophesied war of the gods,  portending the end of the world? 

Now, I do not think it is the end of the world.  It is, however twilight, not for the gods, in none of whom can I find an argument with a dram of evidence that will hold water, much less walk on water, but twilight for ... the idea of America, the sweet land of liberty. 

We have just held a referendum on freedom, and the majority of voters have utterly repudiated liberty in favor of the entitlement looter-moocher class.  I saw them on TV last night at Obama’s Chicago headquarters, dancing ecstatically, their faces radiating that kind of joy you can see in people whose team just won the game, “Man, we really stuck it to ‘em this time!”

So this sounds heartless, calling the underclass moochers, when I am sure that many of them are truly helpless and deserving of love and help.

I do believe in charity, properly delimited and stripped of its connotations of deontological, duty-bound, altruistic, self-sacrifice-for-everybody-but-you, as I’ve written elsewhere.  It’s just that it is a disastrous attack on individual liberty, to put the government in charge of social aid and charity, or in charge of anything but the protection of every individual’s rights, their liberty rights, not this bogus, impossible concept called “positive rights,” or welfare rights, which are claims on other people’s stuff, collected by the police power for redistribution to the government’s chosen beneficiaries.

This morning, Michael Hurd wrote a moving piece in which he concludes that it’s now twilight in America, but not because Obama won the election.  Obama won the election because it was already twilight in America.  I’m sure Hurd meant that it’s twilight for the idea of America, which is surely the idea that each of us should unfold our gifts in a way that allows us to present these gifts to the world, for the purpose of achieving our own happiness, trading these gifts for the gifts of others, cooperatively, voluntarily, for the purpose of our mutual well-being.

The results of this election are a big F-you to this vision of cooperation.  Government intervention does not truck in cooperation, it drives trucks over the decisions of people who don’t agree with the government’s vision.

We should strive to remember that people can live in a coma for a long time and yet eventually come to their senses.

As I wrote yesterday, another financial disaster lies ahead, and Romney’s policies would have done nothing more than to slow down the looming train wreck.

But whether the train goes off the tracks at 15 mph or 60 mph makes a difference, given that FM=A (Force times Mass equals Acceleration), but Romney’s policies proposed nothing that would have repaired the damaged railroad tracks in time to avert the wreck.

So with Senior Social Engineer Comrade Obama in the cab, throttling the producers, when the train of America derails, it should be clear to anyone paying attention that the cause of the disaster is our regulatory-entitlement statism, and not liberty.  Freedom will take the blame, in the mainstream press, of course, because they are mostly a bunch of unwitting (or witless) victims of the seductive intellectual hegemony which remains the specter of Marxism, but reality must eventually assert itself.

Reality is ultimately not to be cheated. 

You can call a pig a diva as long as you want, but when the pig squeals with strident,  piercing, fear of death, instead of singing with supple beauty, you will eventually realize it’s a pig in the slaughterhouse, not a musician in the opera house. 

On the other hand, if you’re blind, you won’t see the pig or the diva. 

If you’ve never studied the economics of Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, Reisman, or even Friedman, you will not have any idea why wealth is not created by printing phony money, or by paying one gang to dig a ditch from Washington to Shortpump, and another gang to fill it in the next day. 

If you’ve never absorbed this crucial body of ideas that gave rise to the American republic, and especially to the arguments that gave us a coherent formulation of the nature of rights and the purpose of government as limited to the protection of every individual’s right to life, liberty, and property ... well, you’ll be deaf and blind to the evil machinations of the gang of looters who govern by plunder to fund their protection racket.

Romney represents a less extreme version of the same regulatory-entitlement statism that has characterized the course this country has been taking since at least the passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, by which  the government grabbed the wholly arbitrary power to destroy any business at its pleasure. 

It’s a footnote, but worth cataloguing a few other momentous events anyway:  there was the banner year of 1913, with the passage of legislation to create the income tax, the SEC, and the Federal Reserve System, which may have been the watershed marking the eventual and inevitable transformation of sovereign individuals, endowed with inalienable rights, into citizen serfs, with no rights at all, certainly no rights that are of an inviolate nature.  Certainly we were well along the statist road by the time of Hoover’s presidency, and there is no doubt that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal embodied the spirit of the whole collectivist agenda.  There have been periods where the pace of liberty’s destruction has slowed down, as during the presidencies of Eisenhower and Reagan, but the general direction, driving down Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, has been relentless.

We are now the most foolish naïfs in the history of our republic.

Congratulations, Barack Hussein Obama, Confiscator-in-Chief. 

Congratulations, Amerika. 

And welcome to France, without the French, soon to be Greece, without the Aristotle.

 

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revised 2013.1119