As someone who lost a lucrative job in the wake of the SCOTUS ruling on Obamacare, I am angry. But I am not angry enough to tear down the whole system and try to start over. That is precisely what the Left wants to do and in their hyper-emotionalism, too many on the Right are playing into that possibility. That end will not be pretty.
The debate still has validity. And, I seriously doubt we will see damage to the 2nd amendment because of a healthy debate. And Congress does not have the authority to change the amendment anyway.
What’s to debate???
“But I am not angry enough to tear down the whole system and try to start over. That is precisely what the Left wants to do and in their hyper-emotionalism, too many on the Right are playing into that possibility. That end will not be pretty.”
You are where I was four years ago.
It’s already over.
Adams called it, “Liberty, once lost, cannot be recovered.”
It’s the lesson of 6000 years of government that the founders tried to pass on to us.
Franklin observed that once we learned we could vote ourselves any thing we wanted from out of the public purse, then we were toast.
This is already done, the ending will not be pretty, and it never is.
Jaques Barzun has a book about the last 500 years of civilization, and the cycle of ‘disatisfaction, revolution, disillusionment’. We’re just going to be another historical footnote, like the Soviet Union was.
The better military and communications technology gets, the shorter the runs between the cycles get. It’s actually funny to watch Putin ridiculing us for making the same mistakes the Soviets did.
What Putin is trying to do in Russia is balance private property rights with a dictatorship.
You can’t get a little bit pregnant, though, and to have a free enterprise system you need the freedom of the press, durable property rights, and the right to assembly.
It’s like fire, take one of these out, and no fire, no economy.
Durable property rights mean the enforcement of contracts in impartial courts of law. When Obama screwed the bondholders at GM, that went out the window for good. The Europeans are about to find out what happens when you confiscate savings out of bank accounts.
Press allows you to say what you need to in order to find needs and fill them. Assembly allows you to gather the talent you need together in order to fill that need.
It takes a while for a ship this size to sink, but you can measure the amount of water in the bilges already - 90,000,000 out of the workforce, with the unemployment rate dropping.
The only way the rate can drop is for people to run out of benefits and the number of new jobs to be consistently below 350,000, which is essentially the new jobs replacement rate.
California is now systematically putting its municipalities into Chapter 9, which busts the pension contracts. I had a neighbor retire up here in WA state with a pension from the city of Stockton.
His checks stopped coming, and he just sold his house and moved down to be near his kids in Arizona. He’s 68, and she’s 65 - bye, bye.
Both have college educations. They were members of the country club up here, and golfed every day. He worked in the planning department down there.
Wait until these pensions start blowing up in earnest here in 2014 and 2015. There’s a reason why DHS is stocking up on ammo, body bags, and armored cars.
My brother’s in a job down there that would have him making about $150,000/year in retirement. Congressman, right?
Nope. He inspects sewer line construction for the sanitation district down in NorCal.