Posted on 04/01/2013 10:11:44 AM PDT by Starman417
While US Constitution and free market capitalism set the the foundations for American prosperity, it took a rugged, passionate, free people to build it. From George Washington to George Washington Carver to millions of other Americans, the United States was carved out a continent of forests that seemed to go on forever, fertile plains, vast mountain ranges and scorching hot deserts. Over time American frontiersmen and settlers forged a country that seemed to have all of God’s blessings in abundance.
Conditions were rarely easy for most Americans throughout most of our history. Coal miners spent 12 – 16 hour shifts in dangerous coal mines in which they sometimes couldn’t even stand. Frontiersmen built a homestead and a farm out of a thick Appalachian forest while fighting brutal winters and a tenacious Indian population. Slaves toiled for years at backbreaking work during freezing winters and boiling summers. At the end of the 19th century over 50% of Americans still lived and worked as farmers, a far more dangerous job than most people understand. The industrial revolution brought sweatshops and drove a thirst for steel, trains and petroleum.
One sometimes has to marvel that America survived long enough to challenge the British for independence and then go on to grow and prosper (mostly) for over 200 years as it changed the world. Were the Americans who carved a nation out of a continent somehow so different than Americans today? Were the Americans who crisscrossed a continent with railroads, telephone lines and highways so different than Americans today? Were the Americans who won two world wars and sent a man to the moon so different than Americans today? Were the Americans who invented the mechanical reaper, air conditioning, vulcanized rubber and the microchip any different than Americans today? Not based on DNA they weren’t. But that doesn’t mean they were the same. While the DNA of the American people today is no different than that of the people who invented the elevator or the light bulb, the American people writ large certainly appear to be.
Go back a little more than one generation ago and it seems like Americans were something of another species. They appear to be relative supermen. In 1970 there were 78 million people working in the United States. At the same time there were 1.5 million people on Disability Insurance. That means that one person out of every 53 workers was on Disability. Fast forward 4 decades and it seems as if the world has turned on its side. By 2012 the number of Americans working had risen by 82% to 143 million people. During that same period however, workers receiving disability insurance skyrocketed up 491% to 8.8 million. Today, instead of one out of every 53 workers being on disability, it’s one in sixteen! That number is particularly interesting because the United States of 1970 was a far grittier place than the United States of 2013.
First off, the United States in 2012 is a much different workplace than the one that existed in 1970. In 1970 fully 25% of the American workforce worked in manufacturing while only 30% of employees worked in the service industry. Today, less than 10% of the American workforce works in manufacturing while over 50% of workers work in the service industry. Given that designing a website, taking an order at Red Lobster or greeting a guest at the front desk of a Marriott is generally less dangerous than welding together various pieces of a Lincoln Town Car or operating a blast furnace at a USX steel plant, America should be a safer place to work. And indeed it is. The death rate for American workers in 1970 was 18 per every 100,000 workers. By 2010 that rate had dropped to 3.6 deaths per every 100,000 workers, a decline of 80%.
(excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
I used to worry about the demise of manufacturing. Now that is secondary to worrying about a country where people don’t work. When I grew up I knew it was expected that I go to college and build a career. These days, that attitude puts you in a really small minority. A country like that can’t succeed.
Not meaning to give you a short answer, but no.
Liberals and their ilk have found their way around the Constitution, making it as irrelevant as possible when it stands in their way, and using it as a prop to further their goals when needed.
Corruption is corruption, regardless of how it manifests itself. People who are willing to lie/cheat/steal are shameless dreck. And, they will be the ones hurt the second most when the collapse comes. And, it WILL come.
Oh, and all those who have been seduced into a life of dependency and hatred will be the ones hurt the most. They will have been destroyed by the very people they were convinced were helping them. And, if any help comes, it will come from those of us they were taught were the ones responsible for their strife.
This only works until the markets someday reject Baraqqi/Bernanke/Geithner/Lew minibucks.
Right now we’re riding a wave of false “prosperity” based on entitlements.
The US is just like that family in 2007 riding a wave of false prosperity based on maxxed out credit cards and helocs on a home with negative equity.
“And, if any help comes, it will come from those of us they were taught were the ones responsible for their strife.”
No. Let the riff-raff starve.
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