During the Great Depression of the thirties when Franklin Roosevelt was president, the economy tanked. Money, jobs and food were scarce for many. The President’s Socialist programs fell under an umbrella called the “New Deal,” back in those early beginnings of the Depression era. Most of the citizens worked on farms, in factories, and some were entrepreneurs, mostly small businesses, like country stores, clothing, hardware, drug stores and the like.
As I look back to my childhood, I recall the independent thinking of most people I knew, and the free-enterprise system of voluntary exchange of goods and services was a way of life. Living in the country on a farm in north Georgia, neighbors helped neighbors, and a person’s word was their bond. The underlying, unspoken word was a life of self-reliance, independence, work and living the life of Freedom. Simply, self-responsibility and self-control.
But all of that lifestyle changed when the Roosevelt era ushered in political government interference in 1933. Farmers were ordered to plow under productive crops and were issued limitations on the amount of acreage. This of course caused unemployment. Then the government implemented jobs, so many left farms and took government jobs working in the forest, planting roses along the road side. That sort of work was contrary to the basic tenets of the exchange of goods and services, the bedrock of the capitalistic, free-enterprising system.
Lots of jokes and stories about this new and different way of life. Most were accustomed to hard work on farms and factories, and none were economists, and it was difficult to adjust to this new way of life and thinking. A consensus in thinking, relative to the government taking over and completely changing one’s way of life, was analyzed as creating jobs by giving half the people post hole diggers to erect fences and the other half shovels, to follow behind filling up the holes.
The common sense way of viewing the economics of the Roosevelt New Deal program, ushered in by first placing restrictions on the productivity of farmers, was simply this: A methodology of job creation was giving everyone a shovel or post hole digger, because one digging holes and the other filling up the holes would provide jobs into perpetuity. Of course some had to keep working, creating and producing in the capitalistic system to provide the money for all these types of jobs. Which money the government took to redistribute to the shovelers and post hole diggers.
So that’s the way it was in the last Great Depression in the twentieth century. Fast forward to 2010 in the twenty-first century, and the news dominated by the tanking economy and absence of jobs. The current political regime, taxing and taking, and creating jobs out of thin air, just like Roosevelt did. Taking from the haves to give to have nots and creating more and more non-productive, useless and worthless government paid jobs. Like census takers and teachers to indoctrinate more and more into socialism.
“A rose by any other name is still a rose,” and a system of plunder and thievery by any other name is still non-productive, and the same shovel and post hole digger mentality.
The government has so interfered with and hamstrung the free-enterprise system, which is the only moral economics on the planet, we’re in the ditch, and can’t get out, until we comprehend the reality of just what has taken place.
In this great innovative age of information and creativity, it may appear to be different than the last Great Depression, but bondage is bondage and the government interfered and restricted a system of productivity and voluntary exchange by heavy duty taxation, policies and edicts; shipped out the means of production to other countries, the same mentality of restrictions placed upon farmers in the thirties.
Now dulling the senses by a mantra of jobs, jobs, jobs. When the discussion should be on productivity, because productivity is what creates jobs to sustain a life of free-enterprise, personal freedom, and private property ownership.
We’re actually living in another era of shovels and post hole diggers, but educated beyond the capacity to think, so sophisticated we keep trying to name the ditch we have dug ourselves into, something else. Not recognizing this regime of change, change, meant a planned economy of socialism.
The perennial Socialist presidential candidate, Norman Thomas, used to tell us, this country would never accept socialism by that name, but under the guise of humanitarianism, would buy it line, hook and sinker, and so we have. The shovel and post hole reality is disguised by the humanitarianism of all the hundreds of government social programs.
Once we were a proud people, productive, hard working, independent, caring and generous. Now we have become a nation of angry, resentful, and unemployed people, thinking in cliches, judging by status and authority. We damn and slander with hateful epithets. We have abandoned self-responsibility.Those of us who speak the truth and sound the alarm are labeled right-wing extremists, reactionaries, idiots and worse.
What kind of people have we become? By our very nature, we are actually generous and caring. Voluntary giving and charitable acts make us feel better about ourselves. But here’s what has happened: Political government has taken by a gun or threat of a gun, gouging from us in everything we do, create and produce, to a point we are now struggling to survive, and nothing left over to give and share with others. We have been stripped of a very basic character trait, that is, personal and individual humanitarianism. Government takes and re-distributes under the guise of their humanitarianism, and we are resentful, and disenchanted and upset, flailing around trying to figure it all out.
Norman Thomas was right. Socialism is abhorrent to most of us, however this nation has embraced it line, hook and sinker under the guise of humanitarianism. The rulers now in charge are winning the battle, by taking the very things which characterized who we were, our human dignity, incentive, our self-responsibility and self-control, our creativity, our compassion of giving, and strangers in seats of power are now in control.
We have NOT lost our personal Freedom and private property Rights, because we were non-caring, selfish, lazy people; it is the essence of who we are, our humanitarianism which is at the core of defeat. A centralized power of a greedy few have captured the essence of who we are and used it against us, is it any wonder we are angry and upset and have made this a socialist country.
The basic problem is one which has always plagued mankind, since the beginning of recorded history, i.e., who is responsible, individuals, or political government? The government now in power in this country is very organized. And self-evident crushing the organization of the free-enterprise, capitalistic system, the planned economy of socialism, under the guise of humanitarianism, is the new order.
This Labor Day weekend, 2010, this nation is in disarray, about to embark on another winter, with heating bills rising, along with unemployment and higher taxes, we must remind ourselves, political government is a con game, keep your eye on this ball, while other plans are in the making. Stop listening to the jack-hammer rhetoric, and take a look at the reality of where we are and how we got here.
Quote from Nietzsche: “Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism….However goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual…who… can be used to improve communities an expedient organ of government.”
And another quote, from Ghandi: “The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soul-less machine it can never be weaned from violence, to which it owes its very existence.”
LET FREEDOM RING
JUST ME
AC
EMAIL: annecleveland@bellsouth.net
One Comment
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