Received in Email...

A Charade of Mass Proportions
A historical perspective of the social security nightmare

--Joel Bowman, The Daily Reckoning

"The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and assistance to foreign hands should be curtailed, lest Rome fall."

- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 55 B.C.

What rhymes with Cicero? Not much. But if, as the saying goes, history itself rhymes, today's welfare-warfare state has plenty worth holding up against the soft, fading light of that long-fallen empire: Corrupt politicians...predatory bankers...ruinous military misadventures to faraway lands...a gluttonous citizenry feeding at the trough of public monies and, of course, the insidious, ridiculous illusion that any single participant could have made one jot of difference to the great charade as it unfolded before their very eyes.

The charade to which we refer is the very same phenomenon the Roman poet Juvenal referred to as "bread and circuses" in the tenth of his Satires. It is the superficial appeasement of the masses by the political class who, seeking to prevent massive uprising and revolt against their rule, dole out meager alms in the form of mass distraction. The success of this grand dupe depends on, and excels because of, the widespread assumption that the political class is working for the benefit of their employers, the taxpaying populace, rather than, as is the stark, impassionate reality, their merely effecting to do so. Nothing, not a sunrise at midnight, not a man immortal, could be further from reality. Far from serving their masters on bended knee, elected officials behave more like dogs than public servants, entirely dependent on their keepers for food and forever assuming they will be around with a doggy bag to clean up their mess.

"Government," as Frédéric Bastiat, writing some 1,800 years after Juvenal, expressed it, "is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."

And so we come to better understand our own predicament today. When a lending institution lends too much and is repaid too little, the poisoned olive branch of government extends. When a profligate spender - with sufficient influence in the public sphere, mind you - falters under the weight of its own obligations, the state appears with a bottomless cup. Multi-trillion dollar bailouts, and more still to come. Schemes, scams and stratagems that, we are told, are all for our own good. From the floor of Congress to the evening news, a trumpet calls all "men and women of reason" to fight against "total collapse of our system"...to lead us back from the "edge of the abyss."

Bread and circuses...

What then, when the Treasury is spent and the Fed's arsenal deployed? When debts sold off to once willing foreigners inevitably come due? When the children to whom this legacy of larceny is left realize the hand they were dealt and demand, with clenched fists of their own, a fair and equal opportunity, the chance to ruin or succeed based on their own generation's cowardice or courage? What comes after the determined destruction of the nation's currency...again?

Nowhere is Bastiat's observation better reflected than when the looking glass is held up to Social Security. The ruse, sold to American's under the same old banners, fraught with "safety net" misnomers and "falling through the cracks" platitudes, is up. On September 30, this Thursday, six years ahead of schedule, the "fund" officially goes into the red. What will they tell us next? What price must we pay in order that the grand charade is allowed to go on? What story must we now swallow?

Don't fret, Fellow Reckoner. They'll surely think of something. And that's precisely the problem.




Personal Note:
The problems we face today are not solely the responsibility of the Democrats; Republicans too have learned to eat at the trough with equal fervor and glutinous abandon. But the problem would not have existed (in this current form at least) were it not for Democrats-- Wilson, Roosevelt... the depression lasting far longer than it needed thanks to democratic, liberal intervention in the economic collapse of the 1930s. The irony in today's democratic economic mantra, however, is the fact that the first depression lasted as long as it did because of Democratic intervention, and now blaming Republicans for this collapse (even though it was Democratic tom-foolery in the housing market), they resort to the same failed interventions of the 1930s, thus ensuring that THIS economic disaster will last far longer than it would otherwise-- assuming no wasteful Democratic spending. That's right, while braying about the failed policies of the previous administration, they are themselves presently guilty of revisiting the failed policies of 'previous administrations' seventy years ago.

The hypocrisy on the left is stunning. As is its lack of long-term memory and its inability to learn from its past mistakes. On November 2nd, God willing, The People will put a leash on Congress, and force THAT dog to heel... as it should be.

Now, who was it that said Social Security was still solvent? Can it truly be that only a Democrat has a grasp on truth? the ability to understand the numbers? and take nothing a politician says at face value?

As children, many of us were told that were we ever in trouble or lost we could go to a police officer or anyone in a uniform and all would be well... we would be safe. And yet we see, more and more as each year passes, just how human-- and not wholly trustworthy --ALL men and women are, even and especially those in uniform. We can't always trust someone simply because they wear a badge, or a uniform. Why then do we trust, near implicitly, the word of our pet politicians? The ones who have US on the leash, rather than the other way around?

Here's my final question. Why is it, knowing our own failures and inability to be wholly and reliably honest to all and at all times, take the word of politicians, mere mortal men, without question? I say, only a fool trusts the word of any man without question. Everything everyone says has motive. No one tells the truth all the time. 'Everybody's got something to hide, 'cept for me and my monkey.' [Bonus points]

And there's a lot of monkeys in Washington right this minute slinging shit everywhere. Unruly whores and sluts to their own careers. It's going to take a lot of time and effort to clean their shit up and get back to doing The People's work.