Ice Box Visions

Sometimes things come to me in the shower. This time it came to me at the refrigerator. I am no prophet, but then what I’m seeing it nothing new if you’ve read history or Orwell.

First, we are going to enter a period of high, perhaps hyper, inflation. There is almost no question of this. It is unimaginable that we will not. Only if there is some miraculous quantum leap in technology and, subsequently, productivity, can this be avoided.

Second, we import much of what we see on store shelves. We are dependent on the industrial capacity of countries like China and South Korea for our standard of living.

I see the draft being reinstated, perhaps as a Universal Military Service with a civil service component. We are going to need a very large army. At some point, all the dire predictions of U.S. imperialism by the left are going to come true. The irony will be that imperialism will be all but institutionalized under a leftist administration and Congress.

Keynesian economic policies have been tried and failed repeatedly. The only benefit to Keynesian theory is that is serves to enhance the power of a central government. That is the only reason it continues to be lauded, and it proponents given Nobel prizes. When it has failed in the past, there have been free-market, capitalist economies around to bail the failures out and prop up global finances. That will not be the case for America this time. No one is going to bail us out or be able to bail us out.

Except at the point of a gun.

We will indeed become the world’s police department – or perhaps the world’s IRS agents.

All the talk about principles and freedom and dialog will go out the West Wing window when the American sheeple begin to bleat and rumble for their Doritos and Idols. The leftist politicians will do whatever they have to do to retain power. They will never again willingly give up the advantage they have in this country. Demographics are – for the moment – on their side. If placating the majority means something like turning South Korea into a colony (to save them from North Korea, again, of course), they will do it a heartbeat.

When you create your constituency by pandering to the lowest forms of self-serving greed, you essentially have no choice but to continue. If you can’t get any more money from your own citizens to mollify the masses, then you get it from some other country. We are already trying to economically strong-arm the Chinese into buying what will soon be worthless paper to fund our debt. Will Reid, Pelosi, Clinton, and Obama use the threat of actual force to continue supporting their power trip?

I hope I am completely wrong – and that would be consistent with my usual predictive ability.

Yet I am troubled by the nature of the “entitlement” mentality that dominates those who support the left. “Community organizing”, for example, amounts to a method of funneling government money into specific neighborhoods. It is the antithesis of productive self-reliant wealth creation. It is parasitic. It is redistribution of wealth. “Government money” means that it came out of someone else’s pocket. But what happens when currency has become so devalued by inflation that no one’s pocket is worth picking in this country? The entitlement/community organizer mindset says, Get it from somewhere else. It they won’t give it up willingly, we’ll just have to take it from them. We move from the Weimar Republic to the Reich in one swoop.

Let’s pray I just got hold of a bad hot dog.