Dear Friends,
It seems to me, if we want to live in a nation of prosperity and liberty, but not one of poverty and tyranny, it is up to us to use our common sense when we vote. We all want to be prosperous that is a natural desire of humanity. The drive for liberty is a heart felt feeling that people have had since the days of Adam and Eve. How unfortunate then that these two mutually compatible wants are almost never met? Instead we always get tyranny and poverty. Our leaders constantly lead us astray, lowering our standard of living and becoming ever more tyrannical, until the nation state, city state or empire becomes so rotted from the inside, it collapses from something that wouldn’t have been a bump in the road a mere generation earlier.
I believe this is because of the fiction of enough. Oh, we can have enough pain, enough hunger or enough sickness, but it is impossible to have enough wealth, power, luxury, food or happiness. We might be sated for a short time after a huge meal, the giant bonus might make us happy for a day, but as soon as the food is digested or the bonus is put in the bank, we want more. There can never be enough of a good – while even a little of a bad is too much. It is in our nature to strive for more good and less bad and only a saint is immune.
This maxim applies to government and it’s officials as much as the common laborer, possibly more. Those in government want more money, sex and power. The seven deadly sins are all the more deadly when exercised by the political elite, because they not only destroy the virtue of the elite, but the nation they lead as well. No matter how much power the elite get they demand more. No matter the problems they created with the power they were already given, they want more, to fix those same problems, which will certainly be used to create more problems… so they can get more power. They can never have enough power over the individual, sex with young interns or wealth at the expense of the people.
History says nothing if not, when government grows beyond simply protecting the people from foreign states, safeguarding our lives and watch over our property… poverty, plague and war result. In fact, the fiction of enough is exactly why there is war in the first place. No nation has enough land, no matter how much land it has, no nation has enough wealth, no matter how rich it is, and no country on Earth is satisfied with the resources it possesses. All countries look upon the wealth, land and resources of their neighbor with a greedy eye. Perpetual war is also the most efficient way to remove our liberty from us, from subjecting us to tyranny, to “protect us” from this or that bogyman. This is made easier, by the fact the new class elite control the media in all nations, including the US. We are so easily deceived.
The covetousness of the political elite is not spent only on the property of other nations it is most hungry when turned on the wealth of their own people. Those in power will think of all kinds of ways to plunder our wealth for their own use. In this, the more power the government has, the easier it is to take what we earned through labor, to line the pockets of the elite. President Harry Truman said, “Anyone who gets rich in politics is a God damned crook…” How many politicians, in any country on Earth, are not rich within a year or two of gaining office? The more socialist the nation’s government is the richer the political elite and the poorer the people. That is because no amount of wealth is enough, even if it costs the nation it’s economy, liberty and happiness.
The only answer is to limit government’s power over us. But power taken is never returned except by a collapse and reset. Of course the elite will scream to the rafters that they need that power to do us good. But as I have pointed out, that power will do us no good, it will enrich the political elite and destroy our culture, society, nation and economy. The political elite know this as well or better than you and I but their greed, lust and hunger, overpowers their patriotism. When a politician tells you that he or she needs to be able to take from someone to give to you, they are really telling you they want to be able to legally steal from others, including you. You will get no benefit but your children will live in poverty and tyranny because of it. They appeal to our greed to satisfy their greed and call it progress. We are as lazy as the elite and seek wealth without work too.
We follow our leaders, we want to get rich in politics as well, even if we are not members of the political elite. They exploit this tendency in us to manipulate our selfish desires, desires they have put in us when we look at their wealth, power and prerogative, and stand in awe of it. We become desirous of those things ourselves. But in no nation or country ever constituted, has wealth been taken from the people and been given back, at no point in time has power been returned to the people, never has an oligarchy ruled for the benefit of all, and no place where the people have fallen for the deceit that they can vote other people’s money into their own pocket… has there been anything but increasing poverty, lowering of liberty, and eventually, catastrophic collapse. Yes, the elite start it because they can never have enough, but we always go along, voting the most corrupt politicians in, because they claim they will “give” us the wealth someone else has piled up… suckers that we are.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
