—–Original Message—–
From: Luddite
Sent: Saturday, August 04, 2007 9:46 PM
Subject: Guns or Butter?

That is the question, isn’t it right now? Money to spend on guns for the war, or money to spend on repairing a weak infrastructure? We probably can’t afford both, since we can’t afford what we spend now!

***My Response***

Not only can’t we afford the guns, or the butter. The financial house is rotten to the core! There are so many chickens coming home to roost, it’s hard to itemize them all. Let’s take a few big hitters:

* The money has no backing hence we have institutionalized inflation that jacks costs, taxes, and gooferment salaries.

* The Chinese and Japanese are send us stuff for green pix of dead presidents.

* Social security trust fund.

* Medicare/Medicaid/The drug benefit.

* Unfunded liabilities like gooferment pensions.

* Gooferment education making us globally uncompetitive.

* Laws, regulation, and diktats that make entrepreneurial activity near impossible.

* A large portion of the population with an entitlement mentality.

* The phony drug war.

* Multi-generation welfare “farmers”.

* Rich people gaming the system to capture “benefits’.

* Fascism where regulators and those regulators conspire to screw the people, consumers, and the country.

Did I overlook anything?

***End Quote***

Upon reflection, perhaps I wasn’t strident enough. Just about any one of these things would kill an empire. But, again as they say in football, “after further review”, it’s our paradigms and memes that are going to kill us. And kill off the American experiment. And where do we get those? From Gooferment Education!

Gooferment is in “education” up to its nose. There seems to be a federal rule about everything. And, what has it done for us? Created minds full of mush. That’s probably our biggest obstacle to a solution. We are creating people, half of whom might vote in elections, who haven’t learned the basics. In the one size fits all education system, doesn’t ever pretend to attempt to maximize output. Genius or dullard, both get the same “education”. No wonder people revolt.

In today’s global economy, we can’t afford to waste a single brain. I’ve laughed when Iran had the fashion police. They are putting half their brain power on hold. Bad for them; good for us. We should encourage them to propagate that idea around the world. Meanwhile, we need to allow all our people the freedom and liberty to outperform the world.

And, that starts with education. It’s too important to be left tot he gooferment.

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