Ignorance is bliss...

A few days ago I was blissfully ignorant of the $3.83 trillion boondoggle that was about to be unleashed on the United States, masquerading as a budget.  Then I had to catch that darn news report out of the corner of my eye...

Uggh!

Funny, in my world making a budget means assessing how much money I have coming in each month and then figuring out how much to allocate first to things I need, then to things I want.  The latter half of that must of course be balanced against my desire to save and invest.

And that's all I'll say about fiscal discipline... enough has been said about the U.S. government's lack thereof by people much smarter than me.

But I think there's something more pernicious than lack of discipline at issue here.

Our government is engaged in outright theft.  Being perpetrated in the open, at the highest levels, on a grand scale.

They are stealing our money (by eroding it's value as they print more and more of it) and they are stealing our futures (by hopelessly encumbring our children).  And the media is applauding.

And I quote the New York Times "President Obama got his priorities mostly right in the new $3.8 trillion budget for the fiscal year 2011."  Direct quote.

When did bankrupting our country become a priority?  Don't people understand that if you deliver people what they want by climbing higher and higher up the walls of a house of cards then no one will have anything when it collapses (except people who got their money out of the paper economy).

Isn't it obvious that when this sham unravels the poor will be hit hardest?

And therein lies the rub... ultimately this isn't about the poor.  Pandering to the lower class is never about uplifting them, it's about deriving power and allegiance from them.  Sound economies, the kinds with the "rising tide that lifts all boats" are the ones that take care of the rich, the business owners, the ones with capital to invest.  This isn't rhetoric it's a historical fact evident in the ebbs and flows of all great civilizations.

As soon as economic policies become about robbing the rich to pay for the poor you're just robbing the rich.  The poor don't really get helped because it's productive business investment (by the rich), not bureaucratic squandering of tax revenue, that pays for the things the poor really need, like jobs, lower cost staples and goods, and ESSENTIAL social services.

So where does this come from?  How have we lost our way?  The Cycle of Civilizations theory does a pretty good job of putting it in perspective.  I encourage you to read it.

But I want to reference a different theory.  One more rooted in our mythology.

Where to do we find the idea that there is valor in robbing the rich to pay for the poor?

Well I've recently been trying to wade through Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, possibly the greatest book ever written that wasn't written by guys with names like Paul and John, and it shed some light...

(And in case you were confused Paul and John is not a reference to The Beatles).

Bear with me, this is a long quote.  But amazing in every word:

...I'm after a man whom I want to destroy.  He died many centuries ago, but until the last trace of him is wiped out of men's minds, we will not have a decent world to live in... Robin Hood... He was the man who robbed the rich and gave to the poor...

Here I have to interject that the man speaking is a man who has been raiding government ships loaded with booty taken from the rich to be redistributed to the poor.

I have never robbed a private ship and never taken any private property.  Nor have I ever robbed a military vessel-because the purpose of a military fleet is to protect from violence the citizens who paid for it, which is the proper function of a government.  But I have seized every loot-carrier that came withing range of my guns, every government relief ship, subsidy ship, loan ship, gift ship, every vessel with a cargo of goods taken by force from some men for the unpaid, unearned benefit of others.  I seized the boats that sailed under the flag of the idea which I am fighting:  the idea that need is a sacred idol requiring human sacrifices - that the need of some men is the knife of a guillotine hanging over others - that all of us must live with our work, our hopes, our plans, our efforts at the mercy of the moment when that knife will descend upon us - and that the extent of our ability is the extent of our danger, so that success will bring our heads down on the block, while failure will give us the right to pull the cord.  This is the horror which Robin Hood immortalized as an idea of righteousness.  It is said that he fought against the looting rulers and retuned the loot to those who had been robbed, but that is not the meaning of the legend which has survived.  He is rememered, not as a champion of property, but as a champion of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor.  He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity.  He is the man who became the symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don't have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, bu the unearned does.  He became a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, had demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors at the price of robbing his superiors.  It is this foulest of creatures - the double-parasite who lives on the sores of the poor and the blood of the rich - whom men have come to regard as a moral ideal.  And this has brought us to a world where the more a man produces, the closer he comes to the loss of all his rights, until, if his ability is great enough, he becomes a rightless creature delivered as prey to any claimant - while in order to be placed above rights, above principles, above morality, placed where anything is permitted to him, even plunder and murder, all a man has to do is to be in need.  Do you wonder why the world is collapsing around us?  That is what I am fighting...  Until men learn that of all human symbols, Robin Hood is the most immoral and the most contemptible, there will be no justice on earth and no way for mankind to survive.

Wow - such clarity of thought, born amidst the back drop of the Bolshevik Revolution and honed against our own New Deal and Great Society Revolutions.  I couldn't have said it better myself.

When people are right, they're always right (that's one of the ways I know God exists by the way - truth never changes).  I think it's time Ayn Rand made a come back.