Post-election hangover

Things never look as good the next day as they did at the time we were doing them.

So, the people who bothered to vote in this election brought the Republicans back into power in the House and many states after a four year hiatus.

What does it prove?

From my point of view, this election was the same kind of shell game the Fed is playing with the debt. People were mad at the Democrats because they didn’t wave their non-existent magical wand and make everything better since 2006, so now, they’ve brought back the Republicans who they were mad at in 2006 because they believed they caused all the problems.

Yet, the the Republicans don’t have any newer or better plans than they did in ’06, and the Democrats who remain in power in the Senate are just as morally bankrupt as they were last night. Our nation is still suffering economically under the crush of a federal government so massive that no one seems to understand just how big it is, which size includes national debt as high as $19 trillion and growing–you see, no one really knows just how big it is.

Meanwhile, that same government regulates everything from what kind of health insurance you must have to how much water your shower head is allowed to spray. The federal regulation of personal behavior reaches everywhere from your office to your bedroom, and to all the points in between.

And, forget about the Constitution. Many Americans will laugh if you suggest we return to that kind of government. Of course this is better, they will tell you. If we spend just a little more money and enact just a little more regulation of our lives, everything will get better.

Bullshit.

Everything is going to get worse. At some point in the next couple of years, the government is going to have to raise taxes on everyone just to continue to pay the interest on our current outstanding debt, and that’s while the debt is projected to continue to grow by trillions of dollars over the next several years. Medicare and Social Security are going to go bankrupt, and millions of people who had no other plan than for the government to take care of them after they stopped working will experience hardship like they have never known until then.

Government regulation has reached the point where it has effectively stifled economic growth. There is no incentive to innovate, to take risks, to develop, to grow. Even if the economy is growing, it is growing slower than government-inflicted inflation, so much so that our effective growth rate is still several percentage points negative.

What’s worse is that there are millions of Americans who would be offended just by my cynicism if they bothered to read this post. They’re members of the head-in-their-ass generation: people who continue to maintain unfounded optimism that someone else is going to figure out a way out of this mess for all of us if we just give them enough power and money. That’s funny, but I thought we already tried that in the 1930s, and look where it got us.

Of course, the HITAG will be revolted by my not-so-subtle references to the rise of fascism during the Great Depression that led to World War Two, yet so many of the fundamentals are the same now as they were then that it’s uncanny. We’ve placed ourselves on a track that leads only to destruction and we’re demanding that everyone sing kumbaya as we plunge off the cliff.

It’s not for me.

By accidents of birth and geography, I happen to live in this post-Constitutional United States, but I reject its fundamental tenets. I will not suckle at the government tit–don’t feed me your line about roads and the police or you may need to call the latter–, I will not demand others do for me what I can do for myself, and I will not stand idly by while Rome burns.

If you’re smart, you’ll see my point and start working toward the kind of anti-political local sufficiency and independence I am working toward. If you’re not smart, then you’re screwed.

DLH