Posted on 08/10/2009 10:53:26 AM PDT by Notary Sojac
It’s Mourning in America
by Jim Panyard Jim Panyard is the retired president and CEO of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association
Playing off the sloganeers of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 Presidential re-election campaign, it’s safe to say, “It’s Mourning in America.”
Even The Gipper would admit it.
As of June 2009, 155 million people were laboring in the shrinking private sector of the American Empire with a per capita income of $39,751 and a per household income of $50,740.
In addition to supporting themselves and their dependents on those earnings, they were also supporting:
22.5 million government employees at the federal, state and local levels. The average pay of those on the federal government payroll is $75,419 this year, according to Econwatch. The story is much the same at the state and local levels. In Pennsylvania, for example, the average state employee has a pay package of about $68,000 per year, while the state’s household income is $48,576. (As an aside, there are only about 20 million jobs in the nation’s manufacturing and construction sectors, combined.)
3.9 million welfare recipients
46.5 million Social Security recipients, a number projected to rise to about 72 million in the next 20 years.
14.7 million Americans drawing unemployment benefits, with that number expected to rise consistently in the foreseeable future.
The productive sector workers are also paying for everything the Leviathan State does, such as wars, roads,Imperial adventures, private stadiums, bailouts, counterfeiting, ad infinitum. They also pick up the soaring tabs for 47 million Medicaid and 42 million Medicare recipients.
If this isn’t rampant socialism, it will do until the real thing arrives.
How can 155 million productive workers support themselves, nearly 100 million nonproductive others and a seemingly endless list of government endeavors (most of which could be done more economically and more effectively by the private sector)?
Answer: They can’t. Or, as they say in the computer business, “Game Over.”
America’s ongoing and growing financial bankruptcy is matched by its moral bankruptcy with 50 million “legal” abortions and counting; illegitimacy becoming the societal norm and celebrations of sodomy across the nation.
Theologian and author R.J. Rushdoony noted, correctly, that a nation’s religion is reflected in its culture.
What about hope? As my Dad used to say, “S(p)it in one hand and hope in the other. See which one fills up fastest.”
The hard numbers are in and, yet, the illusion so important to the deceased American Dream continues. Americans are delusional because they don’t know what else to be or, perhaps, as Paul Craig Roberts wrote recently, “Americans are as dumb and insouciant as they come. And they think they are the salt of the earth.”
Certainly there is ample evidence for Dr. Roberts’ statement, but with apologies to Shakespeare‘s Marc Antony, “If so, t’were a grievous fault and grievously shall they answer it.”
How much is $11Trillion Dollars (and counting)? How high is the sky?
The Death of Empires and the darkness of men’s hearts have been with us since The Fall of Adam and Eve. Certainly the citizens of Rome, the British Empire, Egypt and Greece never believed the collapses of their nation-states were possible. Like Americans, they mostly believed “it can’t happen here” and then, it did.
It’s not as if our rulers and their predecessors were not warned. From the Founding Fathers through Ricardo, Bastiat,deTouqueville, Mises, Taft, Rothbard, Flynn, Rand, Rockwell, James Buchanan, Garrett and countless others, lost in our false national histories, warnings of the dangers and pitfalls of a free nation were, and are, continually ignored. A free nation is a hard nation. We are now a soft nation.
Across the country countless groups and organizations with some ideas of the past, what the U.S. Constitution was intended to say, what mistakes have been made and how they could have been avoided, are working to bring about political change.
While admirable at some level, these efforts are a waste of time, energy and money. Is it better to have false hope or no hope at all? The political system, thence, our system of government, is a closed shop. It’s like playing cards with The Cincinnati Kid. The deck is stacked and if you start getting an edge, the rules change. In our system of “Blind Justice”, the lady with the scales is always winking at the political suitors who brought her to the dance.
Those looking to save the remnants of America would be better served to look further down the road and try to set up a fallback position for freedom through education of the younger generation in history, economics, freedom and independence.
What Whittaker Chambers wrote to a young William F. Buckley Jr. in 1954, is more true now than it was then. Buckley had bemoaned the potential loss of Western civilization and Chambers replied (in part):
“That is why it is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western Civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there those who, at great nightfall, took the loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.”
Nothing man can do will stop the out of control Leviathan State from continually expanding. It will devour itself. When it finally dies of its own greed and stupidity, let’s pray free men and women will be prepared to construct a true system of liberty and justice.
Let’s train them now.
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(Jim Panyard is the retired president and CEO of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association, a former journalist and corporate executive. He will be teaching world history this fall to a class of home schooled junior and senior high students.)
Nothing like a little optimism to cheer one up.
ALL that is going on here, with the “snitch website”, is giving Obama a pass for a DICTATORSHIP! Yes, I mean a dictatorship. We are working up to the movie “1984” by George Orwell. Animal Farm by George Orwell is a good, get up to speed, book and movie to 1984. Any disagreement with the government is NOT tolerated. Intimidation, force and ignoring YOU and smearing YOU are all part of the plan.
WAKE UP AMERICA!
We need more John Galts like this man to stand up and shout!
Thanks for posting this.
Where is the GOP?
It’s pathetic that they can’t come out ‘fighting’, when the democrat President of the USA is sending out goons to beat up the American people that don’t support his policies.
“...3.9 million welfare recipients...”
This is a misleading statistic because the far greater number of food stamp recipients are actually in a welfare status.
It could then be expanded to the gradual sale or lease of non-essential government assets. There is no logical reason that the federal government should own about two-thirds of the available real estate in states like Colorago, New Mexico, Utah, Idaho, Montana and Alaska and lesser, but substantial portions elsewhere.
NOW: Live for Free Pie 
THEN: Right To Bear Arms 
NOW:
Right To Bare Arms 
THEN: The American Dream, with Work, Accountability, Responsibility 
NOW:
The American Dream, Govt Pays my Gas, Mortgage, Health Care 
THEN: I Have A Dream 
NOW:
I Have A Scheme 
THEN: Morning in America 
NOW:
Mourning in America 
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