Commenter Mike on this Hit&Run post on California [h/t Instapundit] observes:
First the once-great city of Detroit, then California, and soon the entire country if we don’t come to our senses, and fast.
Saul Alinsky’s new leftism combined with old-style Tammany Hall democratic party corruption is the political version of the Star Trek Doomsday Machine, devouring and destroying everything in its path. [links added]
Heh. Here’s a video if you don’t remember the episode.
Can’t say he’s wrong. Leftists have progressively destroyed the economic vitality of every region they dominated for more than a few decades. They do seem inexorable at times but I think we need to remember that things looked equally bleak back in the ’70s after leftists trashed everything. But the nation as a whole recovered and prospered.
Our diversity and compartmentalization remain our great national strength. If one region destroys itself with foolish policies, others can still prosper. California and the Northeast are failing but Texas and other similar states are prospering.
Perhaps this crisis will prove to be the end of the doomsday machine. Perhaps, like the Star Trek doomsday machine, their greedy, selfish overreach in this time of crisis will cause them to choke to death on the cream of their own runaway spending. This happened in the ’70s and led to the rebirth of the ’80s. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take as long this time.
[Deleted by Jonathan.]
You really think that the elites (political, media, cultural, academic) who mindfucked the bejesus out of America to get these tools in office are going to turn on them because of something as small and insignificant as an economic meltdown?
Things arent goint to change until we hit bottom, and baby we got a long way to go.
Harry Angstrom,
With all due respect, Detroit is a victim not of “leftists,” but rather of an auto industry that failed the American marke
(1) It wasn’t just the auto industry but also almost all of the heavy industry that once filled the Great Lakes region. Read the Detroit link for details of the scope of the disaster. (2) The auto companies were managed by three groups, the shareholders, the unions and the government. The latter two did everything in their power to keep American care companies from upgrading their manufacturing and from selling cars that Americans wish to buy.
It’s ridiculous to blame the auto companies management when they were legally blocked from adapting to a changing market. Ditto for steel, textiles and every other industry that the unions destroyed.
If what was was so great, why the big victory for the Democrats and Obama?
If Obama and the Democrats are so great why aren’t historically Democrat controlled states the most productive states? Why is California collapsing?
Grow up. You can’t have a political philosophy that treats business people like out right criminals and expect to have a vibrant adaptive economy.
why the big victory for the Democrats and Obama?
He lied about what he was going to do, and no one in the press called him on it, because they share his contempt for the country. $500 billion deficit too high? Obama quadrupled it. 6% unemployment a disgrace? It’s up by half and rising. Cowboy diplomacy hurting our image in the world? Obama’s trying to destroy the Anglo-American partnership, probably the greatest engine of prosperity and justice of any bilateral relationship between nations in the history of the world, he shrugs at theocrats in Iran while castigating the counterrevolutionary preservation of a constitutional republic in Honduras, and he mocks the Russians in their own country for giving up Alaska. Worried about an unprepared VP? Sheriff Joe is on the case.
Of course, Obama didn’t talk much about economics during the campaign, besides lying about not raising taxes on anyone making less than $250k or warning that John McCain would tax health care benefits (as Obama now plans to do). Obama campaigned on closing Gitmo (a lie, now he reiterates Bush policy on indefinite detention without trial), finding bin Laden (remember him?), and trying to lose the war in Iraq (too late, Bush won already).
He won. OK, that means the nation’s problems are his responsibility. And while he bends over further to duck responsibility than to greet Arab tyrants, the voting public will hold him responsible.
We here know leftist policies trash an economy. Most people do not. So a necessary part of the left’s strategy is to control information and thinking so that their trashing of an economy gets blamed on something else (ref the comment by Harry, above. BTW, could it be restored? it’s a nice exhibit.)
Look for the pressure to control information to increase as/if leftist policies get implemented and then inevitably fail.
Comic book version of the episode, using the same concept, from Feb:
Star Trek: the Stimulus Doomsday Machine
Hi, great post & comments. I just wanted to add that IMHO Brett is right –the quality of the leftist intellect should be left on display.
You can drive from Newark, north up the Hudson, or up to Lewiston, Maine, and west across upper New York to Ohio, Indiana, Detroit. A hundred dead cities, really now just urban welfare camps and government workers and hooked up contractor bust out and asset striping zones.
Hundreds of years of capital investment gone. Once technical innovation centers the marvel of the world in any trade, industry, or science.
All Democrat. Each and everyone.
Massachusetts, New York, Michigan all states with more and more elderly, soon to die and be free of the tax man. Their most productive children fleeing the butcher’s bill for a fifty years of elite leftist theorizing coupled with thug union worker salaries, benefits and pensions many times the private sector, but with half, if any, productivity.
Actually the statistics are even worse as the educated young are replaced with the uneducated illegals, unfit for any but the most unproductive jobs.
Buddy Larsen,
The comment’s gone, sorry. I should perhaps mention that while I (blog admin) rarely delete comments, and Shannon almost never does, there are a couple of commenters whose efforts I routinely delete because they are usually off-topic or otherwise diversionary toward one of the commenter’s particular hobbyhorses.
Diversity isn’t an American Value anymore. At least diversity of thought. Believers in Stateism continue to cut off non-conformists by making everything a federal case. It used to be if you didn’t like the rules you moved and the next state over did things differently. You would have new opportunity, and different problems. But the Stateists continue to lawyer every locality up to the supreme court where they find a constitutional right to take your property and rights for the good of the government. And the good of the people means good of the government.
Want to build on your own land? Sorry the king won’t let you. Whoops we don’t have a king, just green peace, or the sierra club, or acorn, or neighbors against walmart, or… They have lawyers, deep pockets, and can not be reasoned with or bought off. They want to control what you own and they will have it.
Dear people, whoever you may be,
I’m rereading Atlas Shrugged for the third time. The first two times (a long time ago) I applied its lessons to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. Now Ayn Rand’s work seems more pertinent than ever due the events unfolding in my homeland.
The reason I say my homeland is because I’m an expatriate American English teacher living in South Korea. I’ve been living and working in the ROK for twelve years, but I still send in my absentee ballot for presidential elections every four years.
What I’ve been seeing taking place in the USA since January 20 is making me more upset by the day. The mounting deficits, the growing and dangerous dependence on China (many South Koreans are very jittery about China) to finance those deficits, the talk of instituting new (VAT and a big one at that) taxes to help cover those very same deficits, the bailouts of GM, and particularly Chrysler, the attempt to remove choice and private enterprise from the U.S. health care system, the stimulus that went mostly to government drones rather things that would really stimulate, and above all, the despicable behavior of the mainstream media in covering up Obama’s real Chicago background. I had to go and find the red star at the top of William Ayers website all by myself!
All these things have made me very alarmed concerning the future of my country. So I’ve reached one overriding conclusion: it’s time for Americans to revolt against royal authority for the second time in 234 years.
I say this because I don’t believe the traditional legislative process can stop my country’s slide towards the comfortable euthanasia of West European-style socialism. With the idiocy of Bush to guide them, the Republicans have done a very creditable job of taking Dirty Harry’s 357. and pointing it at least at their feet, if not their heads.
So it’s time to revolt. This will be a difficult idea for many Americans to grasp. After all, we are the product of a culture that has based on the rule of law from its very beginnings back in medieval England.
What I’m talking about is starving the Government Beast. Come next April 15, 2010 don’t send in your tax forms. Refuse to pay! If you’re a small businessman don’t pay your state (If you live in California, New York, or New Jersey, this applies especially to you) or federal business taxes. Don’t pay your licensing fees! When the Bush tax cuts expire in 2011, don’t file! Simply don’t feed the Beast!
If you’re worried about prosecution, there’s safety in numbers. If ten million Americans refuse to pay, the looters can’t possibly oppress more than a very small number of people. If ten million small business people refuse to knuckle under to the New Jealously Class, then the Beast will be truly crippled and will be forced to beg for mercy. View your refusal to pay blackmail to the looters as a civil rights issue along the lines of what inspired Martin Luther King during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and the early 1960s. IT IS NOT YOUR PATRIOTIC DUTY TO PAY HIGHER TAXES! In fact, it can be considered a form of treason to file on April 15, 2010.
Anyway, this has happened before. What most Americans don’t remember or never learned is that in the run-up to the American Revolution the British backed down twice over the issue of taxes. Parliament repealed both the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts in the face of fierce colonial protests. Remember, the looters don’t have the mighty Royal Navy behind them, or ranks of hard fighting British Grenadiers, all they have in their favor is the willingness to submit of a people who have been comfortable for far too long.
Michael G. Gallagher, Ph.D.
Seoul, Korea
Johnathan; I see –and thank you for the answer. BTW I posted Paul’s comment (@ #58) in the comments section of Belmont Club’s Minus-Five.
Thanks, Buddy. By coincidence, I posted Lifeofthemind’s comment from the same thread as a post here.
But, don’t you see?, he wants to crash the economy to make us all dependents of his national Chicago political machine. We’ll all be plantation-voters of the democratic party.
Thanks again, Johnathan –I left LotM a note re your post, on the same thread.
Right you are, chuck. Just do a search on Soros vs the Dollar –his avowed lifetime ambition is to (*cough*) ‘level the playing field’ via crashing the Dollar as world reserve. That’s why the O team will not simply furlough the payroll tax for six months –and put a dollar-for-dollar 8% raise in every working consumer’s hands on the very next paycheck.
O is visibly rueful (if you’re a ‘tell’ watcher) at the ‘resiliance of the American consumer’ –because he simply hasn’t been able to print enough money to jack up the long bond rate and finish off the mortgage banking industry/USA economy/Dollar –and thereby finish the job Soros and company gave him to do.
A hundred dead cities, really now just urban welfare camps and government workers and hooked up contractor ….. (Paul)
it’s time for Americans to revolt against royal authority for the second time in 234 years. (M. G. Gallagher)
Paul’s comment reminds me again of the “zombie problem” – the infection comes from government dole and favoritism. (The problem of once successful representative democracies.)
Gallagher makes a call for action NOW and offers a plan of action.
I wonder if the time for action is not “now”, when would the right time be? What is the trip wire? And, is Gallagher’s plan the right preliminary course of action? If not what is?
Going with what #8 wrote – you have all these 1 party blue states and the end result is inevitable. Power corrupts and absolute power and all that. The focus of these states is total control and they see the tax payers and private economy as a big ATM to pay for their boondoggles. It’s like walking all a ledge and wondering whats going to happen – effing disaster is what.
Our diversity and compartmentalization remain our great national strength. If one region destroys itself with foolish policies, others can still prosper. California and the Northeast are failing but Texas and other similar states are prospering.
Very true, but as Tigerhawk points out today (http://tigerhawk.blogspot.com/2009/07/thirty-five-percent-solution.html) Obama and this Congress are attempting to remake (ie., effectively take over) a whopping 35% of our economy before the end of the year. That’s in ADDITION to everything else they now control. How do you compartmentalize against that?