Diary (9): “The Federal Elite in the Hippodrome “
Posted on April 7, 2009
Diary (9): “The Federal Elite in the Hippodrome “
April 7, 2009
What we are seeing today, April 2009, in the political arena of the great US of A, is, sadly, nothing new.
The Federal Elite are, once again, making an even bigger grab for more power, bigger government, and lots more of YOUR money. But they are of course promising to make you happy, and better off, and, hell, maybe they will pay your electricity bill? Your mortgage? Your health care? Maybe Barack himself might even come down and mow the grass and do the dishes?
It annoys me. And it annoys me even more the way the majority of the electorate sits there and passively accepts it, votes for it, and encourages it. The poodles are back in town, sitting up and begging obediently. Wagging their loyal tails, accepting the pat on the head, waiting eagerly for the next handout, removed half an hour earlier from their very own dinner bowl.
The size, self importance and humongous $$$$$ cost of our imperious Federal Government is already grotesque, and ballooning to dimensions that are approaching the bacchanalian. A wild and drunken orgy of power and promises, half- promises, and soaring rhetoric. All sugar coated with good intentions of course. And the ladies swoon, the commentators obsequiously go along with the whole bamboozling charade, and even Jesse Jackson, the champion corporate shake-down artist, is shown on television with tears pouring down his face. He who was previously heard whispering his predilection towards surgical castration of our President’s what’s-its.
When, I would like to know, will cold reality seep in to this merry shin-dig? When will people start sitting back, drying their eyes, and thinking logically? There are cruel laws of economics, that have been proven to exist over and over again, and no amount of tear jerking, solemn pontifications from anybody will change that. You can wish for the moon, but gravity assures you will only get there by careful calculation, and a respectful observance of all the known laws of Physics and Chemistry. We didn’t talk our way to the moon.
I hear different figures of the national debt. I read $30,000 per family. Then I read it was going to $130,000 per family.
But, the cult tells us, Hosanna Barack is going to create or save three and a half million jobs! Or was it four and a half million? I forget. Regardless, it’s gobbledygook. How are you going to measure that? How are you going to prove that claim? Ever? It’s too intangible. And if you suck capital out of the marketplace into government, what deleterious effect does that have on private companies seeking the same capital to keep their businesses running and growing? What private sector jobs does the government DESTROY, whilst it pursues dramatic headlines, a blaze of television coverage, and glitzy policy programs?
I said above, all this Bravo Sierra is nothing new. We’ve been there before. Same theme, different players.
Barack Obama likes people to compare him with Abraham Lincoln. He was angling for that before he had spent a day working as president. I heard some of our TV commentators spouting reverential codswhallop that made me want to write a satire. Is it Abraham Lincoln we should compare him with?
Let’s grab a few books off my shelf. Yes, books. Obsolete things, in this day and age of course, going out like the steam engine and the theory of the Flat Earth. Or maybe the earth is flat. I forget. It always seems flat on television and in the movies. So I guess if the government announces on television that there has been a mistake, and the earth IS after all flat, then that must be so. Right?
Um. Let’s see. “The Roosevelt Myth “. By John T.Flynn. I reviewed it recently on www.amazon.com.
There’s a fun book. Wholly, totally, irrelevant to what is happening today, right? Of course. It was written in the years up to 1956, when the summary was compiled. Ancient history, eh? And History is bunk, we all know that. On top of that, it’s just a BOOK, for flip’s sake. What can a moldy ol’ book teach us that television and CNN cannot?
What the heck. Let’s flick through it.
(page 293) “This mere peep behind the curtain of the hippodrome will serve to afford a glimpse of that stupendous fiscal extravaganza put on in Washington “.
(page 293) “But there was another sector on this economic front,- the embattled legions of the bureaucrats mobilized to police the real producers and to supervise for the State the actual task of production. And at their side was that other battalion of New Deal fiscal philosophers – the bright evangelists of national debt, who were now permitted to gorge themselves on their pet theories… “
If we want to compare the current crisis of 2009, and the present “war ” on the global economic crisis, (drama, drama), with the equally glorious roll of the drums of World War Two, and Roosevelt on the stage, then that would be a stretch, right? Totally different time period, no relevance, no similarities at all. Right?
(page 294) “In the financing and supervision of the war effort from Washington, practically every fiscal crime was committed. And the plain evidence of that is before us in the bill of war. Few realize how vast it was. For the mind, even of the trained financier, begins to lose its capacity for proportions after the figures pass beyond the limit of understandable billions. The war cost I reckon at 363 billion dollars. To form some estimate of this figure it may help to recall that during the 144 years which cover the administration of all the presidents from Washington to the first inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt, the total expenditures of government equaled 117 billion dollars. Yet in the seven years from 1941 to 1947, the cost of supporting the war and its consequences alone was 363 billion – three times as much in seven years as in 144 years of our history. The total amount expended in these seven years was 463 billion. I have subtracted a hundred billion to cover the sums which our extravagant government would have spent had we not entered the war. To complete this picture we must not overlook the solemn fact that we have paid to date (note: 1956 -FM) only one-third of this prodigious bill. The remaining two-thirds stands against us as the national debt, the interest on which alone, when the debt is all funded, will be nearly twice the cost af government before Mr. Roosevelt came to power.
The story of how this vast account and this staggering debt was accumulated is a long and an intricate one. The follies, the recklessness, the appalling ineptness and incompetence, the deep and dark corruption remain yet to be told… “
(page 295) “there is no doubt that this intolerable burden, which will bear down upon the shoulders of of this generation and the next, is the direct result of President Roosevelt’s utter incapacity for administration. Here again, we may turn to a cabinet officer for the testimony. Secretary of War Stimson is lavish in his praise of Mr. Roosevelt and is prepared to forgive him the most costly defects of character in his admiration for Roosevelt’s great stroke of genius in naming Stimson to his cabinet. However, he wrote in his diary in March, 1943:
“The President is the poorest administrator I have ever worked under in respect to the orderly procedure and routine of his performance. He is not a good chooser of men and does not know how to use them in coordination…. “
Irrelevant. Quaint. How funny. No connection at all with today’s events. 2009.
Thank goodness.
F.M.
Last edited by Francis Meyrick on April 7, 2009, 11:19 am
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