Our country is a badly tuned 32 cylinder engine burning 45 gallons a minute, with 1/4 HP at the shaft which doesn’t have the power to pull a slightly stuck bullfrog from the mud without stalling out completely.
How did this happen and what needs to be done?
Did you know that Cubanada, despite all the smoke about equality, actually has 2 welfare systems? The B plan is the one they stick you on when you hurt your back. It normally covers low level rent, hydro, water, sewer, phone, internet, grub and booze with enough left over for a drug, drinking or smoking addiction, perhaps all three.
I’ll leave to your imagination what sort of lifestyle the A plan is capable of buying, but let’s just say if you aren’t the CEO of a multinational corporation or two, you are much better off with a title, an office sanitized for you daily and the pasty clean delicate manicured and perfumed paws of a young schoolgirl in exhange for the soul-taxing duties of a biweekly zoom meeting.
Those less fortunate than the welfare A and B crowds are the poor sods consigned to actually producing something useful for the social strata which they serve and all those above it. They put in long days in all kinds of weather and are generally visible by the callouses on their hands and their overall haggard appearances. In the olden days these folks were known as the proletariat. Stubbornly, they go on producing goods even when ordered to stop by the climate-enlightened bourgeousie of our time.
As the situation devolves in this country, and more and more people find it advantageous to hurt their backs the best solution politically is to add more cylinders to that smoking banging, lunging, burping engine, spewing grease, gas and oil in every direction.
The alternative of telling people the gravy train has gone off the tracks, fallen off a cliff and collided with a burning ship full of fecal material is just not a message a mere politician is capable of delivering. That sort of message is way above even their paygrade. Instead they’ll simply add another cylinder and hope we survive the next election cycle.
How long til the clattering belching engine blows a gasket and grinds to a screeching, belching, shuddering halt? A day, a week, ten years? Who knows? The truth is its a bit shocking it’s still running at all! And we’re are way way behind in our fuel bill !
Perhaps those with the ability to produce useful things will fare better without the extra weight of the entire country on their backs. With thanks to Peter Schiff for this one, the simple truth is that in far too many cases govern-men help is like a blood transfusion from your right arm to your left arm with most of your blood spilling on the floor during the process.
We shall see. We shall see.
There may be a little time left to learn a skill of some kind so you will have something with which to barter for your daily bread when the engine finally rattles to a shuddering stop. Ideally what you want is to be in command of needed resources. Warmth, transportation, something to eat, something to wear, are a few thoughts to get you started. Ministry of silly walks? Not so much.
But ultimately, if as many believe, there is one who holds the title to the planet, that would be the one with the imagination to make the final decision on what each of our futures will look like, and more than likely our past performance will have some bearing on those upcoming decisions.
To paraphrase from the book, “Economics in One Lesson”, Henry Hazlitt writes that the resources removed from one person for the benefit of another carry with the transaction a loss on one side of the transaction as well as a gain on the other. For instance, taxing a business owner removes resources from the business which could have gone to hiring a new employee or buying more efficient equipment resulting in greater production which would serve to drive down the final price of the product produced, benefitting many instead of just a few. This is a valid point.
It is also a picture of exactly what is going wrong not only in canada but throughout the west. I am unable to ascertain the author of the following quote but it sums the impending disaster up quite succinctly:
“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:
- From bondage to spiritual faith;
- From spiritual faith to great courage;
- From courage to liberty;
- From liberty to abundance;
- From abundance to complacency;
- From complacency to apathy;
- From apathy to dependence;
- From dependence back into bondage.”
From a brief perusal of the above list of steps, my personal estimate would be about one point up from the bottom. Yours?
Skulltripper 