The reason a lot of intelligent people have stopped posting at FR is due to comments such as yours. I mean, what's the point of carrying on a conversation if the other person(s) don't have even a basic understanding of the fundamentals at play?
First of all, you need to accept the fact that the People fully embraced Obama; they wanted him and they got him. He himself is a clueless clown - it's the force of his backer's power that is implementing the current agenda. Claiming his election was the result of the system being 'compromised' is just another form of denial.
Now, as to your quoted text above: "they" have no power. The power of the state is completely & utterly dependent on its financial ability to pay (off) various enablers, mechanics and other players who profit from the state's monopolistic power over law & levies.
Take away and/or erode its ability to support its currency and trade via taxation & debt , and the whole charade falls away no different from the the little man behind the curtain in Oz. Know this: the system is going to fail. It's simple mathematics. Here's a nice little excerpt from the Automatic Earth: (Note: People should take notice when hard left libs recognize the same underlying dynamics as free market conservatives.)
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Our economies have hit the big fearsome brick wall of diminishing returns. Today we have a situation where for every dollar that an individual or a company borrows, the system gets out maybe 10 cents or less of growth. In the 1950's, it is estimated that every dollar borrowed would generate 3 dollars of growth. That's a large part of the reason why all those trillions in bailouts, guarantees, subsidies, loans etc are having such negligible impact.
So we have trillions of borrowing and record spending to get a few paltry billions in 'growth'.
A debt saturated society is thus faced with two conundrums as time progresses.
1) The ability to service the debt plus interest declines steadily over time leading to cash flow problems.
2) The usefulness of that extra dollar of debt also steadily declines. Thus we are moving towards a point where for every dollar borrowed we have a contraction (I was going to use that ghastly word 'negative growth' but decided against it) due to debt saturation.
Hence, the marginal cost of taking on one more dollar of debt will become detrimental to society as a whole, as the marginal benefit of that one more dollar is negative. This is precisely how societies decline and as in our present debt based monetary system, the principal must be paid with interest by society as a whole in one form or the other.
This is either done through:
1) A deflationary depression where debt is defaulted upon and living standards plummet and millions are left broke and homeless - a societal disaster.
2) A hyperinflation that leads to the complete debasement of the currency and the utter failure of the monetary system - a societal disaster.
Some deflationistas focus on the mechanics that will make deflation the driving force initially and for the foreseeable future - constrained lending by banks, hoarding of cash, the inability of the Fed to keep pace with credit destruction and the unwillingness of foreigners to finance government deficits indefinitely as their balance sheets are constrained by declining export income (we're looking at China and Japan, the Gulf). When, but only when, an economy has become isolated enough can hyperinflation take place, and as a reaction to deflation. The American economy knows no such isolation, and can therefore not be hyperinflated at the moment. In five years, yes, but the world will be a whole different place by then.
By the way, actually paying back the debt is impossible in a system that requires constant debt creation just to keep even, remember the Red Queen in Alice of Wonderland? One has to run faster just to keep up.
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Forget politics - iron fist economic laws are going to do our heavy lifting. When the Fed's federal reserve notes (our current currency) collapses, the individual states will begin to issue their own intra-state script (like Calif IOUs). This is the beginning of de-federalization - this is how the union is going to come apart.
That’s possible, although you’re assuming that this would be a normal state with a normal economy.
Bambi is clueless - but there’s one thing he knows for certain, and that’s that he wants power. Bambi is basically a Third World kleptocrat thug.
The way collapsed and failed economies and states like Zimbabwe or any other thugocracy keep going is that there is always enough...for the dictator. He gets his through the confiscation of anything he can lay his hands on. The fact that there is no future doesn’t bother him in the least, because he knows it will last at least as long as he is alive. Bambi will have enough to party in the White Hut for life.
Would it work in a country the size of the US? In a country where the majority of the population are not illiterate peasants? Where there are competing interests?
I don’t know. The thing I find disturbing about Obama voters is not that they voted for Marxism (they didn’t, and most of them don’t even know what the word means), but they voted for The One. That’s how dictators like that always get in power, although adherence to Marxism may be one of the ways they enlist the support of the academy and the media elites. But really, for Obama - or any thug dictator - it’s all about him.