By Alan
Caruba
Pundits and experts of every
description love to predict and pontificate. That they are often famously wrong
doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
The Great Depression began on October
29, 1929 with the stock market crash. On October 17th, Irving Fisher, a professor of
economics at Yale University, said, “Stocks have reached what looks like a
permanently high plateau.” A month later
Fisher said, “The end of the decline of the stock market will probably not be
long, only a few more days at best.” The Great Depression stretched for ten
years, in good part due to the “progressive” policies of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt who was elected and reelected to four terms!
Not to be outdone, the Harvard
Economic Society issued a number of predictions that were equally idiotic.
“Since our monetary and credit structure is not only sound, but unusually
strong…there is every prospect that the recovery which we have been expecting
will not be long delayed.” It took the
advent of World War II to energize the manufacturing sector and increase
employment. By the time the war was over the U.S. had, for its time, a huge
national debt, but it was far better positioned for recovery than Europe or
other war damaged nations.
Every recession since then has had
experts predicting upturns just around the corner, but as Obamacare and its
hidden taxes kicks in this year and next, when the Bush tax cuts have been
allowed to expire, at a time when the nation is $16 trillion dollars in debt
(and growing), and when its credit rating—for the first time in its history—was
downgraded, a new recession is not going to go away any time soon. And this time
Obama will not be able to blame it on George Bush.
Matthew 26:11 says, “The poor you
will always have with you”, but there is a strong possibility that most
progressives have not read either the Old or New Testaments or, if they did,
dismissed them as fairy tales.
In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson
said, “So here is the Great Society. It’s the time—and it’s going to be
soon—when nobody in this country is poor.” How did that government program work
out? Johnson would be been better served if he had listened to Thomas Jefferson
who said, “The democracy will cease to exist when you
take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”
And “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government
from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of
them.”
Like Europe before it, America has
succumbed to the siren call of Communism because (a) no one seems to learn
anything from history and (b) most people would rather have the government tell
them what to do and how to spend what little money they are permitted to keep.
When Karl Marx died, most of his obituaries were wrong. The Neue Freie Press in
Vienna, Austria wrote “Marx’s scholarship was an imaginative lie, his doctrine
despair. The damage he created will pass like a corpse.”
Published in 1997, The
Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
documented a history of repressions by Communist states that included
genocides, extrajudicial executions, deportations, and artificial famines. At
the time of its publication, the total stood at 97 million.
Former Soviet premier, Nikita
Krushchev, addressing Western diplomats in 1956, said “Whether you like it or
not, history is on our side. We will bury you.” It helps that Americans
elected—twice—a dedicated Communist. The history of Communist infiltration goes
back to the Russian revolution that took power in 1917. By the 1950s, the U.S.
government was shot through with Communists and “fellow travelers”,
sympathizers. In the 1960s the subversion of the nation’s schools began in
earnest and it should come as no surprise that former domestic terrorist, Bill
Ayers, a longtime ally of Obama, transitioned to academia where he became an
“expert” on education in America.
Just as liberals would wish away war,
there hasn’t been a day since the end of World War II when war has not been
occurring somewhere on the planet and the U.S. engaged in them in Korea, in
Vietnam, and in the Middle East, not counting peace-keeping efforts and minor
engagements. War is the natural condition of mankind, occasioned by the lust for
power in the hearts of despots of every description.
In the run-up to World War Two, Frank
Knox, the publisher of the Chicago Daily News and a former Republican Vice
President nominee said “It is simply unthinkable that we will ever again send
overseas a great expeditionary force of armed men.” The year was 1940. So, yes,
Republicans can be wrong, too. That same year, Franklin D. Roosevelt told
Americans, “I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I say it
again and again and again; your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign
wars.” That changed on December 7, 1941.
You could fill a book about how wrong
those making predictions and promises have been, so it behooves us all to view
what is being said in the White House, in Congress, and elsewhere as to the
direction the nation is taking. Extreme skepticism is the only way to approach
the politicians and the “chatterati” on the airwaves.
The nation’s media has already hidden
the scandals of ‘Fast and Furious’ and of Benghazi from public view. They make
no mention of how an unread, 2,000-plus “Obamacare” was foisted on the nation by
a Democrat party-line vote in the Senate on December 24, 2009, Christmas Eve!
Obama signed it into law in March 2010.
There’s a reason thousands of
Americans have been purchasing guns of all description and laying up stores of
ammunition and it may go beyond concerns of gun bans. A lot of patriots think
that 2013 could turn very ugly, very fast, with fears of martial law, Homeland
Security goons, mass arrests, secret incarcerations, and worse. I have doubts
about these scenarios, but they have long been a part of the arsenal of
oppressive governments.
The trigger, however, for such
scenarios would be the collapse of the U.S. dollar and there are signs—the
massive national debt, the continued government borrowing and spending—that
suggest this is a very real possibility. If and when that occurs, all bets are
off.
What stands between most Americans
and those who might wish to engineer the end to the Constitution is the fact
that America is home to hundreds of thousands of hunters who comprise, by virtue
of being armed, the largest army in the world. A goodly portion of our law
enforcement community and our military are going to refuse orders to turn their
guns on their fellow Americans and doing so would prove to be
unhealthy.
Revolution is never pretty, but
Americans did it once and can do it again to protect the Constitution and our
rights. In a sharply divided nation, however, the level of resistance is unknown
when so many now depend on the government for support. Many will prefer their
chains.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
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