Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Obamerika or Team America


Obamerika or Team America

 

“And as president, I…reject the idea that if we just reward those at the top, that somehow that’s going to work for everybody – ‘cause that hasn’t been how America got built.”  This quote, which reinforces and upstages President Obama’s by now well-known and sometimes ridiculed phrase, “You didn’t build that”, was published in Parade Magazine (inserted in many Sunday newspapers on September 2, 2012, page 9 and 10).  It represents the antithesis of the American way;  those “at the top” haven’t been “rewarded” by the “we” or anybody, it has been their individual stories which incorporate intelligence, experience, passion, tenacity and luck, combined with America’s innovative financial industry.  All this within a sometimes chaotic system of free enterprise built upon the brilliance of our Founding Fathers’ political inventions.  The few “at the top” is exactly “how America got built” –  they began at the bottom in the scrum of Team America    Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, J. P. Morgan,  George Washington and George Washington Carver, Eli Whitney, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Ford, Herman Hollerith, John D. Rockefeller and Bill Gates, to name a few.  None of this was done by bureaucrats in Washington, D. C., but by individuals seeking to better themselves and their neighbors who rise to the top in competition with everyone else in what is the magical chaos of free enterprise.

 

This highlights the clear and stark choice in the upcoming election.  Do we want a country governed by an oligarchy of elites led by a single man who wants to take a hard left from the foundations upon which this country was built?  Or do we want to continue on the zig-zagging path which has led to the most prosperous, most free country in the history of the world?  With that comes the fits and starts from the chaos of freedom – and free enterprise, the democracy of commerce.  This leader, Mitt Romney, has a history of hiring smart people and working with them to success.

 

On September 3, 2012, the U.S. population was 314,295,369 as estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau.  The human body contains 4,600,000,000,000,000 strands, give or take since it’ll take a long time to count each one, of Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).  About 99.9% of it is common from body to body, leaving approximately 4.6 trillion of the little buggers being different from person to person. Taken all together, that’s a lot of difference from U. S. person to U. S. person, diversity of you will.

 

This is a lot of data with way too many variables for any computer or mega-systems of combined computers to be able to model (not to mention the impossibility of humans being even able to agree on what are the variables).  Yet government experts are trusted to write rules by which we are to live our lives by predicting how such rules will cause each of us to act.  A dictionary full of acronymic government agencies determine what we should buy, what we should eat, what we should wear, what we should drive, where and in what we should live, with whom we should associate, where we should…well, just about everything we do.  These rules micromanage our lives.  This is labeled “social policy”, a bed rock of the Democratic Party belief system.  Any social policy gives control over the freedoms of the individual to a small number of powerful elites.  Yet today our government elites can’t even predict with accuracy economic activity, nor the weather nor even corn prices in any predictable way.  You and I could guess with better accuracy.  (Even a dead clock is accurate twice a day!)  

 

In 1955 about 4,100,000 babies were born in the United States.  Of them only .00024% was Steve Jobs.  You double that when Bill Gates is added.  Who could have identified either of them at birth to become who they became?  Does this argue for more central control, maybe eliminating the consequential impact of people like these two, or the messiness of free enterprise with the “survival of the fittest” achieving prosperity for society as a whole as have Jobs and Gates.  President Obama chose Solyndra, free enterprise chose Apple.

 

Medicare rules, regulations and laws consist of over 150,000 pages of intricate, many times incomprehensible words, and this even before ObamaCare.  At any time any participant in Medicare is breaking some law; probably a felony. 

 

Is this really what we as a society desire or deserve?  These laws were written by a small number individual human beings trying to predict or direct the future behavior of human beings.  Belief in this central control is like believing in an unseeable God.

 

Yet that will be Obamerika.  Where the government eliminates dignity and substitutes dependency.

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