Getting It Right -12/18/08

Who Should We Blame? Which Party? Which Politicians?
By Sid Riley
This column presents a conservative viewpoint about items of interest in our community and our lives. Focus is on items impacting your pocket book, your personal freedoms, and your rights. I hope you will read the column regularly and it occasionally influences your opinions and actions. Now, on to the subject of the week:
"Everyone is looking for a scapegoat which we can collectively blame for the national economic crisis we face…Who should we blame?"
The answer- We should blame ourselves.
Over the past forty years we have elected, re-elected, and re-re-elected a tribe of under qualified, self enhancing, system playing, over spending, wasteful, special interest serving, socialistic, ego headed, pompous, perk taking, political party dominated, Washington beltway brainwashed Senators and Congressmen. We are all guilty of lowering our standards and playing these foolish games ourselves. As long as they were also "greasing our palms" and "bringing home the bacon", we were willing to look past their shortcomings.
We have been a nation of excesses, foolishly living beyond our means. It appears that we are now facing a day of reckoning. Financial and economic Armageddon is upon us!
In their panic to respond to the impending doomsday, our wise and learned legislators are clutching at straws trying to seek out solutions as institution after institution, industry after industry, and even bureaucracy after bureaucracy run out of funding. Amazingly, the artesian well of never ending flow of public tax dollars from which they have always drank to their fill, is beginning to dry up! This condition is threatening our basic concepts of capitalism and free enterprise.
What caused this dire situation? What were the major errors committed which contributed to this dilemma? Which political party is to blame? What basic concepts and philosophies led us astray? Which politicians can we blame the most?
I will leave thinking out the answers to those questions to the evaluation and research of the individual reader. However, I will list some of the failures and suspect causes that have helped us evolve to this condition.
● Which political party and/or politicians fostered and protected pro union legislation long after the union movement was no longer needed and only remained to lower productivity, discourage industry, and serve the greed of the workers and the union itself? These policies helped lead to the demise of our national electronics, textiles, steel, toy, automotive, and many other industries.
● Which political party and/or politicians constantly pushed the national minimum wage upward in a pretense to help the poor, underpaid worker while in fact these increases eventually led to the demise of their industry, their company, and their job? The politicians voted these increases into law in order to get the votes of the poor workers they were pretending to help.
● Which political party and/or politicians promoted and enacted poorly conceived international trade agreements such as NAFTA, GATT, and Most Favored Trade Status for China? These trade pacts were entered into under the banners of "global markets", "free trade", and "global economy". However, there were few requirements attached that would force these trading partners to play the game fairly, on a balanced playing field. As a result we "gave away the farm"…or better stated, we gave away all of our industries due to political foolishness and ineptness. (And possibly a lot of international bribery payments housed in Swiss bank accounts.)
● Which political party and/or politicians forced our banking industry through federal regulators to make inappropriate and unwise home loans to hundreds of thousands of minorities, under-qualified borrowers, in order to use the entire national banking system as a "social benefit" program, and thus earn the support and votes of this group?
● Which political party and/or politicians has historically created the laws and regulations that have made it impossible for our nation to move forward on a national energy policy which would greatly decrease our nations dependence on the turbulent Mideast for our energy? This would include who has made it impossible to increase use of nuclear energy, prohibited off shore drilling, prohibited drilling in Alaska, prohibited mining of oil shale in the West, made the use of our coal reserves impractical and has generally thwarted all efforts to develop alternate sources of energy? They did this in the mindless fervor of the "green" movement in order to get the voting endorsement and political donations of that special interest group.
● Which political party and/or politicians created and supported the costly, unsupervised, overly aggressive policies of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP)? These agencies have greatly increased the cost of doing business and have prohibited expansion and formation of businesses. Many of these have moved to locations out of our nation to escape this over regulation.
● Which political party and/or politicians have created a corporate taxation structure that ranks among the highest in the world? This high tax rate increases the out migration of our industries, and weakens those that remain.
● Which political party and/or politicians have defended and abused the legislative loophole that allows wasteful, special interest funding to be attached to bills sponsoring needed legislation, thus enabling the wasteful spending of billions of taxpayer dollars on unjustified projects? The use of the line item veto would stop this practice if our legislators would promote enactment of this concept.
I could continue with page after page of abuses, foolish and self serving legislation, and other instances where our elected officials have served the interest of special interest and lobby groups instead of the interest of the citizens of our nation. It is a sad story.
I quote from a statement made years ago by Alexander Tyler, a Scottish Professor at the University of Edinburg, "A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury."
"From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."
"The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years"
I would have to say…our politicians have not been "Getting It Right!"
Rudiments- Odds and Ends Worth Mentioning:
● It appears that some of the local and national media is on a "witch hunt" trying to incriminate the past practices at Dozier School. Dale Cox, area historian and frequent writer for this paper has finite records as to the source causes of the deaths of the unfortunate boys who died during a turn of the century dorm fire, and a terrible flu epidemic that followed a few years later. They have made a big deal out of the testimony from former clients who were whipped while interned there. Well, during those years every school principal was also giving frequent butt overhauls in his office since corporal punishment was used instead of pleading with the irreverent student to "please stop" or go to "time out", or calling a judge or the sheriff. That is why some teachers now resort to duct tape restraints out of desperation as they try to maintain order in their classrooms.
Note: The opinions stated in this column are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Hatcher Publications.