We all watch in horror the tragedy of the cruise ship aground off Giglio Island. “Inexcusable!” is the universal cry. “Those reefs are on my chart,” says veteran sailor and FOX News host Geraldo Rivera. Anyone else see President Obama as Captain Schettino, America as the Costa Concordia, and self-absorbed Euro-style social democracy as the well-charted Giglio reef?
Virtually everything that Republicans warned us about is happening – a jerk to the left in the trajectory of America: healthcare designed to become nationalized; Iran accelerating toward a nuclear weapon; a gutting of the military; the abandonment of Iraq and predictable descent into chaos (and soon Afghanistan, and the embracing of the Taliban); the abandonment of Israel and embrace of Hamas and Fatah; discomfort with America being a superpower; Keynesian economics run wild; the punishing of success and reward of failure; on and on ad nauseum. Meanwhile, the President’s European model is sinking as they frantically bail out Greece’s stateroom, throwing the water into Germany’s. The reefs are well-charted, and yet we set-sail straight for them.
Newt Gingrich (and then Mitt Romney, and then Rick Santorum) is right in that this is truly a pivotal election. The last one disruptively changed the direction of America, and it must be reset before it’s too late – before we hit the reef of economic and diplomatic self-destruction. Gingrich compares it to Lincoln’s re-instatement of the Union, but I also see it as akin to Reagan’s recapturing momentum from President Carter’s disastrous agenda of denuding the military while pursuing policies resulting in double-digit unemployment, double-digit inflation and double-digit interest rates.
We are headed for unsustainability and that needs to be changed before we drift into blissful disaster.
We are nearing the twin reefs of majority dependency and majority [income-tax] non-participation. That combination will give politicians a free hand to build personal fiefdoms at the expense of sound national policy. We are living the practical results of entitlement mentality. The collapse of the housing bubble was set in motion by the liberal desire to make home ownership more of a right than an earned option, and they accomplished this by using one of their favorite ploys – the sock-puppet of class warfare. “The rich bankers and realtors,” the narrative went, “are denying minorities affordable loans by ‘red-lining’ their neighborhoods for exclusion of consideration.” The fact of the matter was that bankers (and therefore realtors) were unwilling to extend ownership to those unable to service the debt. Laws were changed, banks were coerced, and “fairness” became loans to people who couldn’t afford them. This went on for thirty years, until the pyramid could no longer support itself and the housing market collapsed. Know who the liberals blamed? The bankers and realtors!
The same fundamental flaw in the housing debacle is present in ObamaCare. You can’t make a right out of somebody else’s labor – the market has to be so distorted to support that surreal idea that it dysfunctions to the point of self-destruction. The difference between housing and healthcare is that ObamaCare is poised to bring down the American economy. In their normal obsession for implementing an idea regardless of the actual consequences, liberals have now saddled us with a sweeping new entitlement program just as Baby Boomers are retiring en masse – fewer workers per retiree every day. We are doing to ourselves what we did to the Soviet Union – give the economy an impossible imperative. This is all happening during a financial crisis that hasn’t yet been resolved – what happens in Europe will echo in our economy.
We need to steer back into clear waters before we hit a shoal we knew was there.
Posted
01-23-2012 12:56
by
Eagle Watch