The Longest Journey Begins…

In my last post I gave a little background on the principles on which this great country of ours was founded. It was not founded on political rhetoric, religious rhetoric, or even financial rhetoric. It was founded on sound, for-profit business principles and was originally colonized by people who understood these principles. This is how the colonies became strong enough to throw off the rule of Great Britain and is the only reason the revolutionary war was fought. Our war for independence was not fought for ideological reasons of any kind. It was fought over money and taxation. The colonists wanted the taxation practises of the mother country to be fair, and moderate enough to allow all the people being taxed to sustain a prosperous lifestyle. We now have a movement in conservative politics called the Tea Party, after the original patriot version of the same name. It is fighting for the same causes that our founding fathers did–money and taxation.

We have raised up in this country a generation who have what I have heard called “the entitlement spending” mentality. An increasing number of voters who believe it is the state or federal governments job to see to it they are doctored, fed, clothed, housed, and provided with an ample supply of spending money.  The roots of this generation go back to the time of the Civil War. Before this era, Americans fully expected to earn their own living whereby they provided for their families and other dependents. Generally, “other dependents” in the north meant servants/employees, in the south, slaves.

This “entitlement” generation has sprung from the least educated and therefore the lowest income bracket of the preceding five generations. The domestic servants, farm laborers(not owners), shop and business clerks, street sweepers, chimney sweepers, and the newly freed slave populations in the south. The wage earners as opposed to the wage generators. The people who depended on but did not have to actually run a business for their livelihood. The people who generally had their necessities met without the worry or headaches involved in the hands-on management of the for-profit business that generated the revenue for them. In a word, the servant/slave mentality, acquired through many generations of ordinary people who were accustomed to having the “master” provide all the items still expected by their entitlement mentality descendants. This is the mind-set that grew up in the farm kitchens, domestic servants halls, slave quarters and carriage houses of the Civil War era and has now embedded itself in our public forums like so much bindweed in a border. The legislative mentality that is in a fair way to choking the life out of our entire economy. The “entitlement spending mentality.”

The descendants of this group are the people who passed the social security measure during the Great Depression, and the revised-to-target-the-individual income tax amendment before that, sometime around WWI. You see I am tracing the timeline backward to the source of our current fiscal difficulties which are found in a certain segment of our people and not in our legislative process.

These entitlement spending supporters base their legislative goals on spite. Their spending criteria are motivated by a let’s screw the “rich” people, they deserve it, mindset. Why? They perceive “rich” people as being “the enemy” for some reason. Again, why? If an individual cannot be allowed to prosper in peace in this country, if parents are to be penalized for leaving their children well provided for, the country itself will certainly not prosper. It is not prospering now, is it? My thoughts on this are not new by any means. There was a cagey old Greek by the name of Aesop who wrote a fable about this subject awhile back. It was about a dog and his bone. Look it up sometime. It sets forth in very simple style why our nation is not prospering under the sway of this entitlement mentality.

It is now time to call a halt to the hostilities in the class war that have been moving our legislation for the last fifty years.  The “poor” against the “rich.” Those of you who have been so anxious to prevent “rich” people as though they were some kind of social disease have shot yourselves in the foot. You’re scared about your old age pensions now and basically, you deserve this.  You passed all the legislation you could think of to deprive “rich” people of theirs.

Me? I’m a conscientious objector in this war. It is against my American principles of justice and fair play to grudge people their wealth. Even if their parents left it to them, it is still not mine or really any of my business. We are not going to win the war on poverty by shooting rich people and I won’t support the notion that we should quietly strangle them with legislation either. This has been tried and the result is that now “poor” people have found their own heads in the noose instead. Sorry folks. This is no more than justice.

My next post will be–The War Against The Poor.

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