Mr. Greg Hanners’ July 27 column manifests an ignorance of the American economic situation that is apparently the attitude of, alas, so many of America’s present political class — both Democrat and Republican.
The obvious, ineluctable fact is that the U.S. is the brokest nation in history. No longer can America attempt to impose an “order” on the world for the purpose of facilitating international commerce or for minimizing world conflict. Instead, the country will be hard pressed, as it now is, to perform a national government’s basic functions — to wit, the maintenance of the nation’s border security, of the national currency’s stability and of the rule of law.
To achieve the first goal, the nation should obviously shrink its massive military, which it can not afford, and have the remaining ground forces deployed to secure the nation’s borders, resorting to deadly force if necessary. The Navy and Air Force’s primary missions should be the security of the country’s coastlines and air space. As Britain was forced by the inflexible laws of economics to relinquish international hegemony in the 20th century, so is the U.S. in the 21st.
The U.S. dollar has steadily been losing value, largely because of Obama’s “stimulus,” the administration’s euphemism for “inflation.”
I am informed by my Chinese sources that many Asian banks are now reluctant to accept dollar deposits because of the currency’s high inflation situation. This can be remedied only by a vast decrease in government expenditures.
Mr. Hanners declares that there must be a combination of tax increases and tax cuts in order to mitigate this situation. Nevertheless, past experience has irrefutably demonstrated that, as with Reagan and Bush I, when this dual approach was tried, the increases occurred, but the party dependent for its power upon ever increasing government expenditures, i.e. the Democrats, inevitably aborted the promised cuts.
This is explained by Nobel economic laureate Milton Friedman, whose pronouncements, when compared with the buffoonish bloviations of Paul Krugman and other Democratic supporters, make him seem like a sober man among a crowd of drunkards.
Mr. Friedman, paraphrasing Adam Smith’s metaphor of capitalism’s “invisible hand,” irrefutably demonstrates that government, both state and federal, has a “greedy hand”, which “thrusts itself into every corner crevice” of productive enterprise and is never satisfied with its take.
Therefore, the only way to limit the oppression of government taxation is “to starve the beast.”
Judging from the virulent, violent protests of the Wisconsin state union members and of Greece’s public workers when their respective governments were compelled to curtail their pay and benefits because of economic necessity, one can with a high degree of certainty conclude that those groups here relying upon largely, though not wholly, Democratic created government largesse will not go gently into that forthcoming good night of government austerity. Nevertheless, because of the inexorable laws of economics, go they most certainly shall.
Regarding Merle Haggard’s song of the 1980s, “Are the Good Times Really Over for Good?,” the answer is indubitably yes. As the incarnation will never occur again, there is no Ronald Reagan this time to come to America’s rescue.
Thomas Gary Ladd
Santa Fe, TN