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Revised: January 16, 2010
ESSAY:
THE CRISIS OF REJECTION OF REASON AND THE COMING
AMERICAN DICTATORSHIP
Does
anyone remember paying 79 cents for a loaf of bread? $1.49 for a
gallon of milk? These were the prices back in 1980, when wages were
higher. Most economists agree that real wages and the spending power
of the dollar, have declined and stagnated during the past three decades or
so.
So what does this mean for the average worker in
America today? She/he has to work two jobs just to barely break even
on the bills. In 1995, when I started working, the minimum wage was
$3.35 per hour. Today it stands at $5.15. Some states such as
Massachusetts have higher minimum wages, but in Massachusetts it stands at
around $8 per hour. That is not enough to pay the bills unless you're
living in a tent in the woods, cooking Ramen over an open fire.
The global economy has changed drastically during
my lifetime. America used to have a huge manufacturing sector, with
decent paying jobs where only one parent needed to go work while the other
could stay home and take care of the kids. Over the course of time,
politicians have fiddled while our beautiful Rome burned, and allowed
looters to ship our jobs overseas, to places like India and South
America where workers make a fraction of the American minimum wage.
Today even the last major manufacturing industry left--making cars--has
outsourced much of the actual manufacturing to Mexico and other countries,
slashing hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs in the
process.
So where are the jobs now, particularly during the
worst recession working people have suffered through since the 1930s?
Most sociologists agree that we now live in a postindustrial economy
characterized by a decline in manufacturing and a sharp increase in the
preemminence of service-sector employment. It is not uncommon today to
find former autoworkers who used to make a wage that could sustain a house,
a boat and a pension, working at Best Buy. And throughout this
process, prices on consumer goods--most of which are now manufactured
abroad--are rising sharply in the face of declining real wages.
In November 2008 America responded to this
crisis by electing President Barack Obama, who promised to create jobs
(i.e., by creating a "green" economy), end the costly wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, and fix healthcare. So far, the Obama presidency has been a disappointment
for many; he can now be added to the growing list of looters, as his
approach is to take away the legally, verifiably earned wealth of great
industrialists, and give it to those who have not earned it.
Appropriately, his approval ratings have sunk into the 50's. Indeed,
his strategy of looting has led to only a handful of jobs being created while hundreds of
thousands of jobs continue to vanish into thin air.
Most Americans are beginning to realize that unless
something drastically changes, we are staring into an economic black
hole. Deficits continue to rise--e.g., $1.4 trillion in the current
fiscal year alone--and our children's future is being mortgaged as the
powers that be frantically try to fix the system by borrowing more money
from our adversaries, such as China. Essentially, China now owns the
United States.
And all along, working Americans such as myself
watch as our bills pile up while the looters--the incompetent bankers who
loaned money to people who were ill-prepared to pay it back--are in fact getting the golden
parachutes they weren't supposed to get from the stimulus
packages. Recently there has been a lot of talk on CNN about the
need to cut the compensation packages for corporate execs; yet these same
execs are the financial fuel for the lobbyist machine inside the Beltway,
making it quite unlikely that their interests will be hit too hard by
reform. The looters now control the Presidency and Congress.
I suggest a "strike" by the
greatest minds, the captains of industry, those whose social positions on
the one hand create jobs but on the other hand are being punished by it by a
looter administration. The inspiration for such a strike is found in
Ayn Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged. In her novel, which has incredibly
remained a best-seller for more than half a century, the greatest minds of
industry disappear and set up their own hidden society, not to be found by a
socialistic, looter government.
It would be a grave error for Americans today to
wave off the possibility of dictatorship by assuming that Stalinist-style
socialism could never
happen here. It could, and I believe it will, on the grounds that
history tends to repeat itself and, with the exception of some thinkers,
nothing is learned from the mistakes of the past. Too often, children
are taught not to think, but to obey. I remember as a child watching a
classmate who was accused of some wrongdoing he had no part of standing up
in class and yelling: "This is not justice!" He
was sent to the principal's office. Children grow up to be adults, and
even well-educated ones insist on being given unearned, undeserved handouts
from the State. I've seen perfectly able-bodied, able-minded people
receiving SSI or SSDI disability payments from the government when I know
they're capable of being productive. Such is the nature of education
today, with the exception of some teachers who remain my heroes. This evil
of a looter's dictatorship lurks
before the American people like a great white shark threatening to devour
everything in its past.
So one might ask, what can I do about all
this? Well I believe the time is now to hope for the best but to
prepare for the worst. The best way to do this is to prepare to fight
back against an increasingly narcissistic government. Fortunately, the
American public is highly armed--in fact there is more real firepower in
private hands than in government hands, if one leaves nukes out of the
picture.
However, that does not mean everyone will suddenly pull
together and concentrate their resources in an effort to fight back. A
winning fight that can lead to victory takes planning and preparation, and
organization at the grassroots level. Just as the Minutemen formed
from all walks of life to prepare for a British incursion in the 1770s, we
need a Minuteman-like movement to form today. It doesn't have to be
Republican, or Democrat, or hold any particular political philosophy other
than the will to preserve the Constitution and American democratic
traditions which our founding fathers erected on the basis of reason.
Reason, not mindlessness and non-thinking, must prevail! Personal
politics should be cast aside and a collective consciousness that treasures
freedom, reason, and a society based upon the rational, logical foundation
of trade, should fuel our desire to remain the Land of the Free and the
Home of the Brave. That is really who we are as Americans and it
is high time we began to come together in that spirit.
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Bruce Burleson can be reached at: bruce_burleson@hotmail.com
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