Stop Fixing It

There is nothing so sad as to see an elderly person with a whole medicine cabinet full of various prescription drugs, which are regularly taken several times a day and for some strange reason their health doesn’t seem to improve. Thousands of times, a son or daughter has come upon this scene, taken all the bottles and thrown them away, and the old geezer remarkably gets better. (This is NOT a condemnation of the medical profession, although I haven’t been to a doctor in many decades, take lots of vitamins and minerals, no drugs, and am in virtually perfect health at close to 75). Many doctors seem to know nothing but writing prescriptions, and they have their place, I am sure, but there are many ways to cure bad health or disease, besides drugs. The body will cure most ills, if given proper nourishment…in my opinion anyway, which brings me to the problem of fixing it. “It” being the sorry state of America, and even the world.The entire problem in America can be traced to Washington D.C. and that gang of marauders known as the Congress and President. Their prescriptions are more and more bureaucrats, taxes, and gobbledygook to “fix” any and all problems, even though the more bureaucrats and bureaucracies there are, the worse it all gets. Look at history since FDR. Poor education? Let’s form the Department of Education, which gobbles up money of the printing press variety, educates no one, and hampers what education is left. Let’s go for a Department of Transportation, which transports no one, and gobbles up printing press scrip. Don’t like the old one-room schoolhouse and private education? Let’s tax everyone to make public schools; where today, few get educated. Public schools have been around so long that they are taken for granted, even though they are a colossal failure. Think housing is bad? Let’s form HUD, which houses people who shouldn’t be housed, at the taxpayer and neighborhood’s expense, and which has become one of the most money-grubbing, corrupt outfits in existence.

Don’t like slavery? Let’s fight a war, even though slavery was disappearing rapidly and it had been illegal for 55 years to import more slaves. Let’s call the power grab “Saving the Union.” That sounds good, doesn’t it? (When dishonest Abe got elected, as the first Republican, six states instantly seceded, as they knew what was coming). Don’t like roads? Let’s build an interstate highway system at taxpayer expense, charge no tolls, and kill tens of thousands of businesses, kill railroads, escalate the price of fuel to pay for them forever, and change the cities, face, air, and oil consumption of America. Want to give a lot of power to big shots? Let’s form the Federal Reserve, which isn’t federal, and has no reserves. Let it print money created out of thin air, loan it to the taxpayers at interest, and make them pay through the gills with inflation.

Yes, I can literally go on and on. They write an infinite number of bureaucratic prescriptions, which are all force fed to the citizenry, who, in the main, seem to think that it is all so wonderful, while the nation is flooded with trash, lazy, non-productive people, living off the thousands of welfare schemes. The masses become so drugged with fake hopes, fake money, empty promises, and non-education that they finally actually voted in Adolph Hitler, FDR, LBJ, and now Obama. The drugs and prescriptions of government and bureaucracy, have worked well by making D.C. the absolutely most stupid, power mad, idiotic, corrupt city in the world. And we all anxiously awaited the outcome of the elections. I did, and so did you, even though one was about as bad as the other, and the Congress is hopeless, no matter who gets elected…except Ron Paul possibly.

What is now happening happened in the 1930s, and is absolutely like a carbon copy. The Fed floods the market with tons of cash, which makes the stock market and real estate bloom like flowers in spring, with banks loaning on slim or no margin, thereby creating a huge bubble, which has to eventually bust. It did then, and has currently burst. Then they tried to “fix” the broken economy, like they are trying to do now, only at the expense of the taxpayer. Didn’t work then, and old FDR finally got us out of it by means of WWII. The morons of D.C. are literally printing $2.7 TRILLION un-backed pieces of paper, to “fix” the economy, and it won’t work. FDR’s dollars had to be backed by gold, so he told everyone to turn in their gold so he could print more dollars, which didn’t solve the depression, but robbed the populace of hundreds of billions of bucks, when he raised the price of gold from $20.67 to $35, overnight. Today, there’s no backing, they need no gold to back dollars, so they merrily will print and print and print till who knows when? Will the buck collapse, thanks to printing? I don’t think so, because everyone’s doing it!

If something works well for politicians, other politicians will glom onto it, and do it also, which they are. The world’s a big printing press. All governments are printing their respective currencies like there is no tomorrow…except there is. Hyper-inflation is what it is called, even though the time delay between printing and hyper-inflation fools most. It will come. How to fix the current situation? Not easy, because as each depression comes along, they might get worse, thanks to government. The way to fix this, is to simply let the cards fall where they may. No interference of any kind. No bailouts, no subsidies, and no ‘help’ from governments anywhere. Failures? Lots of them, but they probably should have failed anyway. Broke people and corporations? Can’t be helped. They have done it to themselves or are caught in a bad place. Everyone has to help themselves, no matter the cost.

Cruel? Yes, but when government ‘helps,’ in any situation, the ‘help’ instantly turns to ‘hurt’ of the productive class, whose taxes pay for government, which is hurting them. Obama has promised to ‘help’ the poor, at the expense of the producers who pay his salary. This is known as biting the hand that feeds you. When government endlessly subsidizes, ‘helps,’ and hires tens of thousands of money-ingesting bureaucrats to regulate the producers and hand out scrip to the non-producers, calamity is the obvious result.

The nations of Earth, with America being no exception, are flooded with trash, non-productive people, who have no real reason to exist, other than to suck the very life’s blood out of the productive class. The entire continent of Africa, to make a generalization, is classic. Ask the Germans about the Turks. How about North Philly, East St. Louis, Detroit, or South Central LA? How to get rid of them? Other than letting them self-destruct, I have no idea, but at least I know the problem. Government handouts gave us the underclass, and now we have to put up with them, while they continue to suck at the government teat. Suppose all ‘help’ ceased? Suppose 85% of federal bureaucrats were fired, the IRS eliminated, and their offices sold to productive businesses? Suppose 85% of all federal government were disbanded, and D.C. was turned into a virtual, temporary, ghost town, till producers could come in? But then, I speak of a Constitutional government, and that is old-fashioned, I realize.

The Constitution tells government what it can do, and that range of permissions has been so totally ignored and violated, that it is no wonder we are where we are now. What to do? There is no better place on earth to live, so we must stay here, preferably in small towns with sound banks, small governments, and no severe weather. And of course, we must protect ourselves. I can offer no other solutions, because the decay has so thoroughly infected the patient, that more prescriptions will only harm us more.

Regards,
Don Stott

November 25, 2008

The Daily Reckoning