America is more than a country; it is the ideal of liberty. In economic terms, liberty translates into the entrepreneurial spirit of hard work, risk taking and self-reliance. And this spirit has made America rich beyond compare.
Unfortunately, over the past four decades, much has been undone.
Under the guise of a new, “social” justice, political leaders have turned our native ethics upside down. Profit-taking is now seen as gouging; success is greed; businessmen are predators. This creeping socialist transformation of our culture has finally broken the back of the American economy. FULL ARTICLE
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Things are crumbling all around us, governments are going bankrupt, and people keep screaming – more, more more!
what fools.
Yeah, they sure are screaming, and they’re going to be doing more because they just don’t know the real cause of our problems. Government schooling anyone?
Until the American taxpayer wakes up and quits voting ‘corrupt’ politicans into office, nothing is going to change.
Unfortunetly, it is almost impossible to find a politican who is not ‘corrupt’.
“…Congress offered increasingly generous entitlements to an increasingly dependent population. This has resulted in the decay of America’s productive sectors and a massive depletion of accumulated wealth.”
How about some examples to enforce this claim? I’m having a hard time seeing any “entitlement programs” leading to the decay…
It seems more likely that the “socialism” of protecting businesses rather than American workers, by letting them outsource our jobs or not pay their system development charges for their impact on OUR infrastructure (for example), has stimulated more decay than trying to help our citizens in need.
Here’s one – how about the billions they spend on protecting the oil and keeping oil prices down for you and me. Oh, and how about the awful, inefficient medicare, or the military that “protects” us by killing people around the world, or our government schools that are churning out lower and lower grades every year, or.
This argument has some interesting points. However, the crux of the argument appears to rest entirely upon the validity of the proposition, entitlements were the cause of the decline of US manufacturing. This is a prodigious claim that the author fails to support with any empirical, or, for that matter, theoretical justifications. In fact, it is presented as though it is a truism.
I suppose he is claiming that the welfare state, somehow, precipitated the moral decay of the American population, which resulted in the collapse of American manufacturing. Nevertheless, I fail to recognize any clear connection between these two events. In fact, I see no reason for accepting such a conclusion.
If anything has contributed to the decline of American manufacturing, it has been the freer market fundamentalism that has been dogmatically adhered to in all instances of foreign policy deliberations involving economic trade; a neoliberal fanaticism that was embraced ever since the end of the Second World War.
We were told that the increased productivity that is fostered through the exploitation of cheaper, foreign labor markets would free capital allowing for reinvestment in the US economy. This injection of capital into the US economy would, in turn, create higher paying, higher-skilled occupations for the American workforce.
This all, of course, was based upon the assumption that the corporations, which were increasingly becoming multi-national - due to the fact that they were no longer geographical constrained; a transformation propelled by trade policy as well as technological advancements in communications and distributions – would actually reinvest in the American economy.
Unfortunately, what the freer trade group-think failed to foresee was that these now global corporations could simply reinvested in the same foreign economies while continuing to target the American consumer market, because the implementation of freer trade policies had dismantled the necessary tariffs and other protectionist measures needed to create an incentive for corporations to base their manufacturing inside the United States.
The argument made by this author appears to be a last disparate attempt to vindicate the policies responsible for the very state of the US economy that the author, ironically, decries.
r cole
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