Posted on 08/12/2011 4:57:32 PM PDT by Kaslin
The trick in this business is not to be right too early. A week ago I released my new book — the usual doom 'n' gloom stuff — and, just as the sensible prudent moderate chaps were about to dismiss it as hysterical and alarmist, Standard & Poor's went and downgraded the United States from its AAA rating for the first time in history.
Obligingly enough, they downgraded it to AA+, which happens to be the initials of my book: "After America." OK, there's not a lot of "+" in that, but you can't have everything.
But the news cycle moves on and a day or two later, the news shows were filled with scenes of London ablaze, as gangs of feral youths trashed and looted their own neighborhoods. Several readers wrote to taunt me for not having anything to say on the London riots.
As it happens, Chapter Five of my book is called "The New Britannia: The Depraved City." You have to get up pretty early in the morning to beat me to Western civilization's descent into barbarism. Anyone who's read it will fully understand what's happening on the streets of London.
The downgrade and the riots are part of the same story: Big Government debauches not only a nation's finances, but its human capital too.
As part of my promotional efforts, I chanced to find myself on a TV show the other day with an affable liberal who argued that what Obama needed to do was pass another trillion-dollar — or, better yet, multitrillion — stimulus.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
“Big Government debauches not only a nation’s finances, but its human capital too”
Dead on.
“For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.”
“The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people.”
Big Government means small citizens:
It corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically. Within living memory, the city in flames on our TV screens every night governed a fifth of the earth’s surface and a quarter of its population.
Great article by Steyn.
.
Wincingly, painfully, epigrammatically brilliant.
" . . . the most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people. This means among other things, that even a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard . . . "
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.