IN its ongoing efforts to promote the anarchy of the Occupy Wall Street movement, bastion of Progressive Education Columbia University (average annual cost $44,000, most of it paid for with taxpayer-funded educational aid money) of New York will offer a new course. Bet that’ll look good on the ol’ resume.
Why doesn’t they just get honest and own the bias?
UPDATE: Columbia University has apparently realized their folly, although the adoration of the world-owes-me-a-living crowd is still alive and well. Half a loaf…
2012 is going to be a very important year for America. As of this morning the total debt owned by the United States Government is $15,136,161,854,225.80: fifteen trillion dollars. Both Republican and Democrat administrations have happily accumulated this debt, using the value of the American economy as a cash cow. The current Federal government deficit stands at over $1.4 trillion: imagine being given a credit card with a thousand dollar limit and charging a total of one billion four hundred million, with no assets on hand to pay back the debt-with no end in sight and a wholesale refusal by both majority political parties aided and abetted by a sycophant, tendentious mass media to realize the cost bearing down on the economy.
The only reason this has happened is because the American citizen allowed it. Professor Victor Davis Hanson illustrates the effect:
But the big story of 2011 was debt, as in $16 trillion of it at home, a bankrupt European Union abroad, and a number of blue states—California, Illinois, New York— struggling under burdens of pensions, public employee salaries, entitlements, and the flight of higher income earners. There was a pattern here, right?
No one in the media connected those dots that Plato and Aristotle did long ago from their own observations of radical democracy: the “people” —hoi polloi, the dêmos, the ochlos, whatever—inevitably vote themselves entitlements that they cannot pay for and then in vain damn the shrinking number of those who can pay for them for a while longer—while questioning the entire premise of a system that allows some to have more than others. Under Obama we piled up a new $4 trillion in debt. The media was content to say that it was Bush’s fault, given that the latter did the same thing—but it left out two key “buts”: one, Obama did it in three years, not eight; and, two, Obama added to an $11 trillion existing debt, not a $7 trillion—a consideration in the modern age of interest.
Decades of mass-media approved Federal Government adventurism and subsidization has created a dependent class that has suckled at the teat of shabby lucre for two full generations and found it sweet: the government-dependent classes–the Éducateurs professionnels, the public employee union organizations, the perpetual students, the professionally unemployed–enjoy a level of protection that is an affront to the rest who have to foot the bill.
This is not a new story. Hear the refrain of a 1930′s song offered by a recipient of that largesse during the massive (and as economist Amity Shlaes illustrated in The Forgotten Man, largely useless) spending of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal:
Roosevelt! You’re my man. When the time comes, I ain’t got a cent. You buy my groceries And pay my rent!
The established political parties in turn have exploited this dependency to retain and expand their power over all taxpayers. For evidence of this one need look no further than the recent Occupy Wall Street street theater, where products of government-subsidized art, academic and public union circles set up Potemkin villages in public places, made major nuisances of themselves–and were adored, coddled and praised by progressive Government and mass media circles.
This can only exist so long as support for funding this kind of behavior continues. And it has to stop.
To stop this requires that the citizen taxpayer to make the environment in which our Federal Government operates toxic to this kind of adventurous spending. It will require hard choices by the citizen-and harder efforts to effect change. A return to the classic liberalism that was the backbone of the American nation’s Founding will restore America’s economy and true fairness.
What are the main tenets of classic liberalism? Hear Firewall’s Bill Whittle describe it:
The American Tea Party movement is a strong proponent of these principles. 2012 will be the year that the American citizens: the Joe the Plumbers, the small business owners, the near-forty percent of the population whose annual earnings are less than $49,520-the individual citizen’s share of the accumulated debt owed by their Federal Government.
