Replies

Actually, the parallels with Argentina are pretty scary. A hundred years ago, Argentina was a prosperous country with vast resources, and well on its way to becoming a significant player on the world stage, with its exports of grain and beef that earned the country considerable foreign exchange.

Then the disease of “progressive” political thinking took hold, and the redistributionist agenda become the law of the land. Appears there were a significant number of people living at the poverty level, and many of the immigrants (largely German) were displacing much of the Spanish-language natural-born citizenry in trade, banking and production industries. In reaction, the nativists took up the politics of revolution, and forced many of these recent immigrants from their positions of power, through the ballot box and the ramming through of legislation to “level the playing field”, which was more like confiscating wealth.

Argentina went into a long depression that started after the First World War was concluded, and they never rose up to any degree of real prosperity even under Juan and Evita Peron. There was some influx from persons, many of Nazi sympathies, fleeing the defeated Germany after the end of the Second World War, and this contributed a little to the feeble revival, but international scorn soon reversed even that modest upturn. For some time, Argentina became the intellectual heirs of the disease of National Socialism, and they nurtured that ideology well. Many people were “disappeared” during that era, and there are still traces of the police state that Argentina was for many years.

And now the United States is teetering on the edge of sliding into a police state of our own. Coincidentally, is is at almost the same time as we are also teetering on the edge of a “fiscal cliff”.

There is an old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”

Times are about to get interesting, and not necessarily in a good way.