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people and capital move constantly

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This strangely titled article purports to speak to a familiar universal experience—what remains after a migration. As one who migrated, I recognize the territory.

My journey began in a thriving medium-sized city of wealth and opportunity. Everyone worked, banks lent money, men built businesses that provided employment, children played in the summer without much supervision, homes rarely stood empty during the day, the fine arts were produced in all sorts of forms and venues throughout the year and people went out to enjoy them, and families came together at punctual meal times.

The order and freedom allowed young people to dream about their future lives. My dream was pretty general. I thought it would be cool to live in different regions of America—to spend a couple decades in each of them and enjoy the full American experience over the course of my life. In large part this dream came true.

In the expanded time perception of youth when the clock moves way too slowly, one gets the impression that things are more permanent than they are. But the city of my halcyon youth could not stop time, and would not preserve that ideal combination of people and elements that surrounded my place in it.

People and capital always move. External forces create new opportunities, and diminish the potential of old exploits. Things change.

Regionally, my home area is more wealthy than ever, but the distribution of wealth, property, valuable real estate, and jobs throughout the region is all new. Except for service jobs—of which many more exist than before—the nature of capitalized skilled jobs in the region bears little resemblance to the factories that formerly dominated the region’s employment.

I have no reason to doubt that material shifts of this fundamental nature happen throughout America and the world. What happened to my home town region happens everywhere in the world, constantly.

I am lucky to have the option for nostalgia over the simpler time I grew up in. Someone who had a misfortunate childhood probably does not look back so fondly. It fascinates me that children today may in the future consider this time as the simpler more nostalgic period, and may even want to preserve it from whatever chaotic future they find themselves in.

It also fascinates me when people migrate to an area and adopt a nostalgic view of that area with an objective to return that area to the stasis of the nostalgic view they found there. It happens a lot in Elbert County.

People take a drive through here, see the trophy ranches owned by worldly billionaires, and develop a false foundation for nostalgia that does not reflect the hard scrapple circumstances of existence those who tamed this place endured. No one in their right mind would choose to return to such difficulties.

The romantic trophy ranches built with today’s money earned from other places are not relics. They are new, just as the current business climate in my original home region is new and bears little resemblance to what happened there in the past.

We cannot freeze time in a place, though many devote themselves to the pursuit. For young people looking to experience all the world has to offer, there is probably no more effective way to get them to leave home than to try to prevent change and growth.

Returning to the Rothman article that spurred these thoughts, the author seems more interested in connecting the alliterative labels: “dying,” “defunct,” “despair,” and “dystopic” to “Trump voter” than he is in adding any insight about the ebbs and flows of people, capital and economic activity in America.

defining America down

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Obama’s Osawatomie speech

Obama’s change for America is to lower expectations by providing government enforced fair and balanced outcomes for all Americans.  Leave aside the thorny fact that government cannot succeed in producing such an outcome–that it’s completely impossible for government to do that.

Most importantly, the key takeaway from yesterday’s speech is that Obama’s version of the American Dream is an American nightmare where unlimited opportunity becomes “a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.”

Sounds all very pleasant, but it’s a far cry from the land of unlimited opportunity where anyone can do or become anything they want if they’re willing to work for it.

People don’t immigrate to America to get by modestly and then quietly die.  That is the life they want to immigrate from, not to!   The American Dream is about unlimited personal and societal growth and creative opportunity.  It’s about a life accessible to anyone that is not limited by heritage, not limited by any other man within a consensual framework, and especially not limited by a government “by and for the people.”

America has the largest middle class of any country because it’s where a lot of people end up after aiming for the top.  If Obama succeeds in convincing Americans to aim for the middle, he will have lowered expectations for all Americans, and the ranks of impoverished Americans will grow.

A president should lead the country by expressing high ideals, not low expectations.  This has always been a problem with both Michelle and Barack.

2012 no brainer

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Return to the Article

September 21, 2011

Republicans to Obama: The Whole Country Can be Rich

By Karin McQuillan

 

The good news is that America has wealth beyond dreams that can be realized in the next decade, producing a million new jobs.  According to a recent Congressional report, the United States’ combined recoverable natural gas, oil and coal endowment is the largest on Earth.  Our resources are larger than Saudi Arabia, China and Canada, combined. Our known resources can meet the country’s need for oil and gas for the rest of the century.  That’s not including shale oil, the true energy future.  If we used our own oil, we could replace imported oil from the Persian Gulf for the next fifty years. By then cars will probably be running on something else.

Now turn your eyes to where real jobs are being created. [Read more…]

Here’s hoping for change

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In “Hitler’s Beneficiaries” by Gotz Aly, I learned how the national socialists kept the average German citizen content during the war through redistribution of war booty, through socialized medicine, appropriation of wealth from conquered countries, dispossession of European Jews, regulation of banking and industry, and propaganda.  Mr. Aly showed that national socialism was a political scheme designed to keep the German lower classes in favor of the regime.  And it worked.

In “The Pink Swastika” by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, I learned how the Nazi Party evolved from many socialist and sexualized small groups to become a self-referential inner circle built around Greek concepts of virility, youth, masculinity and ruthlessness.

And I look around today and see that all of the same precursors exist.  Go to any ANSWER web site and look at the hundreds of links to other web sites for similar groups, all aggrieved, all willing to use force to redress their own vision of social justice, economic inequality, and sexual inequality.  I see how the majority in this country, who I assume are mostly not in these sorts of hyper-politicized groups, nevertheless are now conditioned by several decades of predominantly leftist education and national media.

The national socialists in Germany took several decades to coalesce into a mass murder machine.  They didn’t start out killing, they started with a basket of supremacist philosophies and it took a long time for reality to catch up with their philosophies.

It feels like that’s where we are now–in the catch up phase.

Reality is slowly catching up with what have recently become the governing philosophies in America.  We won’t get to a terrible end for a while, maybe not for quite a while.  But I would really like to see the trend reversed, because where we’re headed currently, with the basket of nationalist, socialist, sexualist, and militant philosophies in control, and with political and economic mechanisms to manipulate the democratic majorities keeping these forces in control, is a dark dead place.

Coincidence is not causation, however, coincidence is not sufficient to explain the evolution of the Nazis.  They grew from their component philosophies just as we grow according to our DNA structure.  They weren’t pre-determined, but they were heavily influenced.

What hubris to think that we can engage in similar nihilistic, destructive, hedonistic and militant past times, and expect a different result.

hoping they change

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America, It’s Your Fault! How’s That For Change?
By MARK STEYN Posted 04/08/2011 05:19 PM ET

Hey, it’s the weekend, and everyone’s singing the same maddeningly catchy refrain! Rebecca Black’s “Friday”? Nah, that was last week’s moronic sing-along. This week’s is even perkier! “Paul Ryan proposes to end Medicare as we know it,” sings former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta.

“It would end Medicare as we know it,” sings Sen. Max Baucus of Montana. “It’s going to end Medicare as we know it,” sings Nadeam Elshami, communications director for Nancy Pelosi. “It does end Medicare as we know it,” sings Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa. “I drove all night to watch Paul Ryan e-e-end Me-edi-ica-a-are as we-e kno-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-w it,” sing all 24 semifinalists on the Celine Dion round of “American Idol.” [Read more…]

A Menace To Our Future

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Obama

Worse than Nixon, Carter and Clinton.

A Scorecard Of Negatives, A Menace To Our Future
By ERNEST S. CHRISTIAN AND GARY A. ROBBINS Posted 03/16/2011 07:03 PM ET

By any rational standard, Barack Obama gets an F for job performance and should — on that basis alone — either resign or be voted out ASAP before he does further harm. Obama is a strange man who often seems not to be paying attention. Does he have a second job and work for America only part time? Is he real or virtual? Other nations no longer look to America’s mysterious president for leadership. “President Obama stands mostly mute at the sidelines like a perfectly groomed mannequin,” reports Matthew d’Ancona of the U.K.’s Telegraph. So faint and fumbling is Obama that even his hard-core lefty colleagues are forced to avert their eyes in embarrassment. An exasperated Richard Cohen at the Washington Post blurted out the truth regarding the president: “Like a picture hung in the sun, he fades over time.” [Read more…]

Opportunities for Change

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Opportunities For Change To Fix The Fiascoes of ‘10 – IBD

IBD – Opportunities For Change To Fix The Fiascoes of ’10

  • Defund Obamacare
  • Return federal spending to pre-2007 level
  • End all stimulus spending and return balances to the treasury and to taxpayers
  • Reform Medicare with market solutions
  • De-politicize the Federal Reserve and stop “quantitative easing.”
  • Privatize or shut down Fannie and Freddie
  • Stop the Fairness Doctrine and similar proxies that threaten free political speech
  • Replace the TSA with Isarali air security methods
  • Stop Net Neutrality which is a canard for internet content control by government
  • Fight the Islamofascist war to win it with finality wherever it is exposed.
  • Fund missile defense systems
  • Exit the new Start treaty
  • Securely fence the southern U.S. border
  • Pass the 3 pending free trade agreements with South Korea, Columbia and Panama.
  • Require all federal regulation to be written by legislators through the legislative process.

Thomas Jefferson

"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."

Aristotle

"Only an armed people can be truly free. Only an unarmed people can ever be enslaved."

Karl Popper

“A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.”