A poll or survey or something came out today claiming that one out seven Americans now have incomes below the poverty line. Not sure exactly what the poverty line is -- it used to be something $21,000 per year for a family of four, but that was more than 10 years ago, I think. Anyways, good to know I'm not alone, sitting here trying to figure out how to pay both the summer electric bill and my cable/internet/phone bill this month. Trying to figure out something else to do to make some money. Forget looking for a job. $8.00 an hour just won't do it, even if I could find something for $8.00 an hour.
Anyway, just wanted to point out.... THIS PROVES MY POINT. Socialism doesn't work. Not even 60% socialism doesn't work -- or whatever the exact statistic is for government control of the US economy since the Comrade took office and started "transforming" the nation. Remaking us on the shining model of Uganda or someplace.
I do wonder precisely where the tipping point is between what we've been told is a "mixed economy" and a socialist dashing-headlong-into-a-totalitarian-controlled economy, which is where we seem to be now. I repeat, I'm rather surprised the USA went down so fast. But I guess that's what happens in a fast-moving, extremely sensitive and responsive economy. No big backlog of reserves, which is expensive to maintain because it's dormant and tends to go obsolete pretty quickly. Know what I mean? You've got to actively deploy all your resources, not sit on them waiting for a rainy day. Dangerous and risky to run so flat-out, but there it is.
I wrote a magazine article a while back about selling or merging a company. The audience was small business owners. I interviewed a gentleman who bought and sold businesses, arranged mergers, etc., and quoted him saying, "How many business owners lay awake all night worrying about whether or not they've made the right choices? Many have invested everything they own in their business, and their employees depend upon them to succeed."
Not really a weepy scenario, but you should have seen the response. A lot of readers wrote and emailed, very appreciative that someone understood them. Almost a love-fest, and I'm not making fun of them at all. They carry a heavy load and take it very seriously. That requires some real courage.
Anyway, something I find very interesting about the current economic situation relates to the novel, Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. Since it's been continuously in print since it was first published in 1956/58 or about then, and since I went to Amazon.com and noted a healthy sales ranking for it once again about a year ago, I'm assuming it has a pretty wide readership. Whether readers agree with Rand entirely or not. I would say that 200 years from now, scholars will look back and say that book was probably the most influential work of fiction in the 20th century, but I digress.
The story in Atlas Shrugged goes that the government keeps getting bigger and bigger, more and more corrupt, more and more intrusive. Many industries are regulated out of existence, and everyone is taxed too much. And oddly enough, the "Robber Barons" begin to simply disappear. They're just here one minute and gone the next. Their companies either fold or go to hell in a hand basket, mismanaged by others (or, in the real world, by federal regulators), and the whole damn country slides into an inexorable decline.
I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but it's sufficient to say it's all on purpose. The business owners actually are on strike. They just refuse to play the game anymore and walk off the field. In the novel, this strike was more or less instigated and promoted by certain people.
In real life, it's happening kind of by accident. Businesses can't get loans. Many businesses are terrified of what proposed regulations will do to their operations and operating expenses -- regulations like all the crap involved in socialized medicine (Try it! You'll like it!); the threat of crap-n-tax and of the end of the Bush Tax Cuts. There's so much unemployment generally that consumer demand is way down across the board.
If business owners aren't going on strike deliberately, then they're shutting down or moving out simply because the burden of doing business in the USA is simply too heavy to carry, and the probable returns are not worth the effort.
Who knew that Atlas shrugging was part of the "invisible hand" mechanism that controls free markets? How very cool. Reality rears its ugly head.
FYI, Ayn Rand lived through the revolution in Russia, its "transformation" from a backward and stagnating imperialistic giant into an industrialized, backward and stagnating imperialistic giant. Ayn Rand witnessed first hand communism being implemented as a way of life.
Another interview I did once for a very different publication was with an elderly woman who had lived in Moscow in the 1920s. She was a kid then. She said her family lived across the street from a food storehouse of some kind. The party members who ran the place -- redistributing the wealth -- used to pile up sacks of flour inside, near or in front of a back door. So this lady, as child, and her sister used to go over to this back door every so often. Loose flour sometimes sifted through the cracks around the door, and the two little girls would lick their fingers and try to dab up the spilled flour from the pavement. It was something to eat.
And I'd like to note that the Ukraine, a Soviet state, has the potential to produce more wheat than the USA.
I imagine Ayn Rand's experience was similar to the woman I interviewed, though I also believe Ayn Rand was a little older at the time, a little more consciously aware of what was going on around her.
And, sadly enough, in Atlas Shrugged, she's proving to be right on the money.
On a happier note, why is the Comrade picking on John Boehner? I like John Boehner. Bob Scheiffer and others apparently have grilled Boehner about smoking cigarettes and about his tan. The Comrade smokes and so do I. As a matter of fact, the Comrade's smoking is probably the only thing I like about him.
Boehner's constant tan seems to be quite the scandalous hot topic in the mainstream media. Yeah, unemployment at 9.6% and probably getting worse, almost $13 TRILLION dollars in debt, and Iran's Abracadabrajab is building an atom bomb. Let's focus all of our attention on John Boehner's tan.
Pazzo Pelosi, House Speaker, is Boehner's counterpart in the House, he being Minority Leader. The Republicans have taken one tactic in the election campaign urging people to throw Pelosi out. If the Republicans win a majority in the House, Boehner will replace Pelosi as Speaker. The last I heard, Pelosi had a public approval rating of 11%. That is, 11% of the country actually approves of the job she's doing, so presumably the remaining 89% don't. So I suppose the Comrade and others are trying to make Boehner look somehow worse than Pelosi. Because of his tan?
Bulletin for the democrat National Committee: It's really not what's on the outside of your head, but what's inside that counts. Once again, the American public is one step ahead of the dNC..
Save the Republic.
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