Don’t be self employed, the government will make your life miserable. If I knew when I started my business what I know today, I would be renting chairs and umbrellas on a beach somewhere, only dealing in cash. The government has made my life hell. Constant forms to fill out, regulations to follow... it really sucks owning a business. I hate this government.
So, my goal is to win the lottery, take my cash and tell the US government to P.O. Of course that will be after it steals half of my winnings. Here is to hoping for that asteroid to hit DC soon.
I would also like to ride a bike on the Great Wall of China.
Don’t be self employed,”
I love it. Moved the office to the house 3 years ago, got rid of the clients I didn’t like, created a situation where the others are totally dependent on me. Can work in my underwear if I choose and take a nap during the day with the phone nearby. Flying under the govt radar.
My bucket list: Go to the Texas State Fair - lived here 24 years and never been. Other things I would like to see happen but they are in God’s hands - the Fair I can do with some help from my son.
In a year or two (maybe sooner if Obama's tax increase is as bad as I think it will be) Grandma is going to sell our family business, and we're all moving to rural France. We have a nice little place all picked out in Bordeaux -- no Muslims, no freeways, no rednecks in pickup trucks. It's a place of cows and sheep in green pastures, a little church on a hill in the center of town, and two trains a day, one to Poitiers and Paris. It's a place with cheap, 500-year-old houses, fresh bread, and a flower market on Thursdays. Blond Mountain is within a day's walk. Doctors there still make house calls. We have good friends living there now, with more to come. It's not perfect, but it's real.
I love America -- the America of The Dick Van Dyke Show -- skinny-tie, New Frontier, hippie-hating Kennedy-era America. I'd die for that America. But for Obama's America? Forget it. The America I swore to defend is gone, and it isn't coming back. I can't bear to see my child grow up in the nightmare world it has become -- strip malls, body piercings, and churches in steel sheds out on the freeway. Zombie America: a place with no culture, no manners, no hope, just race cars, 'rasslin', and reality TV. Non merci.
Don't get me wrong. France isn't even close to perfect. In many ways it's as bad or worse that the U.S. -- it has too many Muslims, taxes are too high, the government has its finger in every pie, and the politicians are crooked slimeballs. In other words, it's just like America, only on a smaller scale.
Unlike America, however, France still has an intact national culture -- and that's what makes it attractive to me. It's still a civilized country, with its own unique language and traditions, and it has a government that passes laws to protect those traditions. It's a country where people work to live, instead of living to work. And, despite its many, many flaws, France has a government that still puts France's interests first, and isn't afraid to tell the rest of the world to go to hell if need be. You know, kind of like America's government used to.
I also prefer France's economic policies. French industry is overcentralized, overunionized, and overtaxed, and of course it's tied into the idiotic European Union, with all its Brussels-born bureaucracy and B.S. And yet France is still a country that makes things: cars, fighter planes, rockets, consumer goods, steel, ships — because the people who run it don't believe in that free trade crap, and do believe that a country that makes nothing is nothing.
And it's a country that isn't afraid of technology, as America has become. In France, 80% of the electricity comes from clean, smokeless nuclear power plants instead of coal-burning smog monsters. I want my kid to grow up in a country like that.
I leave with regret. I'll always be a Texan, but in a few years Texas isn't going to be Texas any more, and I can't bear to watch it go bad. Staying and fighting would be pointless: there's no chance of winning. The current system is ridiculous, rigged, and rotten to the core, and no matter which party wins neither one will do what has to be done. No, before things get better the whole house of cards is going to have to come down -- and I don't want my kid around here when it does.
Later, after the Crash and the Crackdown, when the current political and social order here is in ruins and there's a real chance to restore Dick Van Dyke America, I'll consider returning.
This will always be Home. But I can't stand what Home has become anymore. Five years, max. Then we're out.