Decadent democracy
Our decadent democracy
Borrowing for current consumption is the Big Red Flag at any level -- individual, family, business, or government.
The US Government is borrowing at a mind-boggling pace for current consumption, with enormous bill to be inherited by our children and grandchildren.
Greatest Generation we ain't.
It may simply be that democracy always fails once people discover that they can vote themselves benefits paid for with Other People's Money. To resist that temptation would require significant, perhaps heroic, levels of integrity and forbearance, two moral qualities that an Entitlement Society systematically erodes and ultimately destroys.
Hobbes saw organized society as the way humans avoid a "War of All Against All," where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. But a welfare state or entitlement society may promote a different form of internal warfare, in which the power of government is used to appropriate and redistribute what others have earned. For that system to collapse only requires that the earners finally lay down their tools and quit (see "Atlas Shrugged"), or pick up and leave for more encouraging and appreciative climes (see "France").
Byron
Borrowing for current consumption is the Big Red Flag at any level -- individual, family, business, or government.
The US Government is borrowing at a mind-boggling pace for current consumption, with enormous bill to be inherited by our children and grandchildren.
Greatest Generation we ain't.
It may simply be that democracy always fails once people discover that they can vote themselves benefits paid for with Other People's Money. To resist that temptation would require significant, perhaps heroic, levels of integrity and forbearance, two moral qualities that an Entitlement Society systematically erodes and ultimately destroys.
Hobbes saw organized society as the way humans avoid a "War of All Against All," where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. But a welfare state or entitlement society may promote a different form of internal warfare, in which the power of government is used to appropriate and redistribute what others have earned. For that system to collapse only requires that the earners finally lay down their tools and quit (see "Atlas Shrugged"), or pick up and leave for more encouraging and appreciative climes (see "France").
Byron
posted by Byron | Thursday, January 03, 2013
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