Carl F. Wordenwolfeyes@clearwire.net
Nothing cures the disease of Liberalism like a Great Depression.
I have always subscribed to this particular principle of life that goes as follows: “Every adversity carries with it the seed of an equal or better benefit”. I believe Norman Vincent Peale wrote that in his excellent book, “The Power of Positive Thinking”, or maybe it was W. Clement Stone, but no matter: The fact is that every adversity does have a hidden, and potentially better benefit you can take advantage of, but only if you train your mind to look for it, and that characteristic seems to separate the losers from the winners in this life.
The winners in this life see adversity as a potential opportunity, while the losers see adversity as the end of the world, take Prozac or Methamphetamines and feel sorry for themselves. It’s all right there, hidden in your attitude, Brothers and Sisters, and it is a principle of life that is never taught in public schools anymore.
The coming economic storm enveloping the United States right now is a formidable adversarial condition. American citizens are losing homes right and left to foreclosure, the Dollar is in deep doo-doo and falling, and hyper-inflation in the United States has never been more likely, rivaling that of 1938 Germany. The Jobs Report just revealed we lost another 80,000 jobs in March.
Right now, the winners are picking up foreclosed homes at substantially reduced costs, acquiring them for the thousands of Americans soon to be forced into renting their homes from them. These “winners” are the small fraction of Americans who went without the 60” High Definition televisions and all other such indulgences, saving every possible dime for the future. The few Americans with substantial savings will soon be able to pick up motor homes, boats and other recreational vehicles for pennies on the dollar from the Grasshoppers who played their fiddles in the face of this coming economic Winter, placing the very homes they live in on the block through refinancing schemes to buy over-priced homes and “flip” them over to the next speculator for a nice profit. But when the music stopped and the housing bubble burst, they not only lost their investment homes, but also their own homes.
The generations that emerged in America right after the Great Depression would never under any circumstances, hang paper on the home they lived in for anything other than a life-threatening situation, but all those lessons were lost by time and comfort, and now we see the exact same scenario of homeless Americans living in tents in Southern California and elsewhere.
On the bright side, the virtual religion of Liberalism is about to take a terrible hit. Sooner than anyone thinks, Americans of every liberal stripe are going to find out the hard way that Socialist government programs are going to go bust, perhaps even including Social Security long before the analysts ever predicted its demise. These people who seem to believe government can afford to provide all their needs, and all the needs of the so-called “disadvantaged”, will suffer the horrifying reality that “public” money is a finite commodity and its lack now threatens them.
Liberals who once claimed all Americans have a “right” to quality medical care, a decent home and a reliable, government-provided safety net for retirement, education and including the most basic food stuffs, will discover that nothing whatsoever is their “right” if they don’t work for it. Just wait & see how “liberal” these same people are when they are forced to compete for jobs currently held by illegal aliens! Starving liberals will suddenly turn and join the fray, demanding the government expel those interlopers. Those bleeding hearts will change their attitude fast when they can’t feed their own children after having spent years lobbying for the “rich” to pay for all those Socialist programs. The problem will be that the “rich” won’t be nearly as rich, and the tax revenues taken for the purpose of wealth redistribution will diminish to the point those social programs will be untenable to support.
You need look no further back than what happened to Argentina, one of the most socialistic governments ever to exist before the money ran out. Argentina went into economic shock, and they responded by shutting down something like eleven of their thirteen major government buildings, including the social programs. They rolled back nearly all their government regulations and taxes on businesses and basically told the citizens they were on their own to either succeed or fail on their own initiative, and when the citizens realized they were on their own, they got the initiative and motivation to work and produce very quickly.
That is exactly what is about to happen to the United States of America. Suddenly, all that money going out to other nations in the form of Foreign Aid will dry up by demand. All those people who are otherwise able-bodied and able-minded now receiving welfare benefits, food stamps and housing assistance will be treated with the scorn they deserve and cut off. Our insatiable appetite for war will become a thing of the past. And what is most unfortunate, those who are disabled and truly needy will be the first to rely upon family and friends and churches to sustain them, because there will be no government nanny programs left intact.
Americans who have considered themselves autonomous financially, will suddenly find themselves dependent upon each other, related or not. For the benefit of all, their petty differences of the past will be easily forgotten when in the good times, these same differences seemed insurmountable.
So there is a silver lining to this coming economic storm: Americans are about to get their character back. No matter how many tax-payer bail-outs to save failing investment banks like Bear Stearns, there is no stopping what is about to transpire, and I foresee this mess reaching the point of critical mass when panic selling takes place and the Stock Market finally collapses.
But the question remains to be answered: When the chickens do come home to roost in this nation that has turned against God, will we respond like our forebears did to the last Great Depression, or will we degrade into a vicious crime Mecca in the major cities, with citizens literally feeling forced to cannibalize each other just to get by?
I fear I already know the answer.
