Eight Decades of Free Thinking

Where did all the jobs go? The news is dominated by unemployed workers, drawing unemployment. What happened in this country to cause so many changes, affecting millions of lives? Government intervention into the lives and factories and workers plus farmers and farm workers, is the cause.

I have lived long enough to recall life as it was in another era, before the tentacles of political government grabbed such a foothold, and witnessed the change.

A few months ago, I visited the farm I grew up on in northeast Georgia. The house I lived in until age 16, on the farm my father operated, had been torn down. It adjoined my grandfather’s farm, where I spent a lot of time growing up. His old farm house was still standing, but all the buildings surrounding were gone. The large front yard was split in half by a new highway.

As I stood there looking at the house, my memories were so vivid, I could see it as it once was, in my mind’s eye. The house sat in the middle of all the surrounding farmland acreage. At the edge of the yard all around the house, there were buildings. One was a storm cellar we ran to when stormy weather approached. But the cool underground area was lined with shelves for storing all the canned fruits and vegetables raised on the farm. There were several small barns on the opposite side of house, and an open door garage, which housed the T-model Ford vehicle my grandfather drove.

On the large front yard, is where all the bales of cotton sat, before taking to the market to sell in the fall. I had so much fun playing on those bales of cotton, with my aunts and uncles.

Across the road, which was a narrow red clay road at that time, were many large barns. Buildings which housed the cows, horses and mules. Feed for the animals stored in loft of barns. Various buildings held peanuts. When harvested the entire vine was removed and stored in the barn to dry before removing the peanuts from the roots. One building held farm tools, plows, saws, chains, rope, and the many items used on the farm. There was a well beside the house and another across the road to water the animals. Many different buildings housing various things used and harvested on the farm.

In several outlying areas were small houses for laborers who worked the farm. It was a farm which sustained the lives of a number of people, living on the farm.

When I visited recently, it was an eerie feeling to drive through my family farm and surrounding farms, and see barren lands with nothing but a new house here and there. As my son and I drove across the county, I saw nothing growing on the land, just a few cattle grazing here and there. No one seemed to be working and growing anything on the land anymore. A few chicken houses dotted the landscape.

Later on we took a trip in North Georgia and the same thing, acres and acres of farmland, with nothing growing on it but a few cattle grazing here and there.

I recalled when it all started under the Franklin Roosevelt regime. Farmers were ordered to plow under crops, given government orders they could only plant a limited amount, decided by the government. The federal government issued small payments to farmers, not to grow and produce. Each county had government paid commissions, to monitor the farmers and land us age. Some were subsidized to plant trees on the prior productive farmland.

Aside from barren farmlands I recently drove through, there were empty factories in the nearby town. The cotton mills and other factories, where so many in the outlying areas worked, including my mother, were empty and abandoned. Instead there were dozens of outlet malls and restaurants, lining both sides of the major highway. Instead of an area of productive farmlands in the country, and factories in the small town, producing usuable goods, now it was tourist trade.

Dozens of stores up and down the highway, selling all kinds of merchandise, mostly imported from other countries. Clothes, housewares and such, manufactured in other countries and imported for sale in this country. I witnessed with my own eyes the transformation of a country, with a productive people on farms and factories to one of a service-oriented life merchandising imports.

This transformation is repeated over and over in all areas across this great country. This once great industrial country of factories and farm production is no more.

In the news recently about the horrible earth-quake in Chile, reports about U.S. imports of fruits and vegetables from that country amounting to billions of dollars. Instead of growing ourselves, we import.

Most of the jobs available now-a-days in this country are service jobs, government jobs. Jobs clerking in stores, working in tax-supported school systems, hospitals, restaurants and so forth, all service-type jobs.

This once great nation was industrial, and farming, which produced all the goods necessary to sustain life. That is no more, the jobs of industry have been shipped to other countries and the food supply mostly imported. Very few manufacturing jobs, compared to mid-twentieth-century.

Millions of younger generation in schools, millions of older generation retired. The lower-class are on all kinds of government doles, from food stamps to medicaid. The upper echelon have money and enjoy tax-breaks, from foundations to all sorts of government loop-holes. It’s that middle-class of workers from 20 to 50, in the squeeze.

This country cannot sustain itself on service jobs. The majority of jobs have been displaced by imports of cars, clothes, appliances, furniture, etc., and no longer available to American workers seeking jobs.

While the bureaucracy in Washington are P.T.A.-ing, that is, meeting, eating, and retreating, this country and its economy of farming and industrialization has already collapsed. Politicians are holding on to their lavish lifestyle and holding meetings trying to figure out jobs. La de da and tut tut. You can’t go to the fox to find out what happened to the chickens.

What happened to this once-great nation has fallen from the top down. Government intervention with doles and controls is the cause. Now it’s difficult to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Everyone knows doing the same thing over and over expecting different results is insanity. But this is what government is doing, today. Dealing with the symptoms of that which they caused.

It’s a matter of direction. We have been headed in the wrong direction for a very long time. How much farther before total collapse? When and who will change direction? Only in the spirit of the American people will the direction change. Electing new politicians will not cut the mustard. But that seems to be the pervasive notion, to elect a new batch of politicians.

The re-building of America must come from the bottom up, to regain that which has been destroyed from the top down. Political government can’t create jobs out of thin air. Their major role is plundering and talking passing more laws, making speeches and making excuses.

The Citizenry must re-create the industrialization of this country and resurrect the life in the vast wastelands, lying dormant. So much has been used building so many structures, houses, shopping centers and etc., now empty.

We have replaced what we need with what we thought we wanted, like two people living in a twenty room mansion sitting on a lake, golf course or in the middle of 50 acres of farmland.

We are living in an era in defiance of our very nature, i.e., created to be creators, now we must re-create a country of industrialization, working everyday, making the things we need, rather than importing from other countries.

After World War Two, when so many worked in factories building planes and tanks, guns and helmets, many returned to towns working in factories and on farms for a short few years. But when government intervention stepped in and changed all that by such things as over-taxation, factories closed and jobs shipped out to other countries. From the collapse of industrial steel business to the closing of clothing factories, business fell like dominoes.

It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out what happened. All one has to do is take a ride through the country and view the unused farmlands and abandoned factories to know why there’s so much unemployment. Which will increase, not decrease, until we turn around and start producing goods again.

If we stopped buying the influx of imported merchandise, it might motivate the American spirit to start producing again. A buying strike might do wonders.

I have children, who are entrepreneurs, but difficult to operate a profitable business due to excessive taxation and overload of government rules, regulations, policies and edicts. The first thing which needs to happen is political government off the backs of the people in this country.

This is a nation of intelligent, smart, hard-working people, now in a ditch covered by interfering governmental bureaucracy. We have already pretty much stopped producing, now it’s a matter of getting government off the backs of producers, stop buying imports and revive production in this country again. The question is, have we reached our bottom to do this? How long can we sustain ourselves with mostly service jobs? I don’t know. There may be those out there smarter than I, who do know. What is self-evident is the cause and solution.

Frederic Bastiat stated it quite clearly: “The choice before us, the question of legal plunder must be settled once and for all, and there
are only three ways to settle it. The few plunder the many, everybody plunders everybody or nobody plunders anybody. We must make our choice among limited plunder, universal plunder and no plunder. The law can only follow one of these three.”

LET FREEDOM RING

JUST ME
AC

email: annecleveland@bellsouth.net