If there’s anything more dangerous than a one-party system, it’s a one-party system people falsely believe to be a two-party system.
America is not merely divided; it’s contradictory.
On the one hand, a majority of voters want the government to provide lots and lots of free stuff. It’s way beyond welfare. It’s more like an entitlement to get whatever you need, whenever you feel you need it. This applies whether you want free health insurance, free cell phones, free agricultural subsidies or free bailouts if you happen to own a bank that collapses.
That’s why Obama won reelection in 2012. People liked the idea of free stuff, and they wanted more of it. It made them feel secure, and they felt entitled to it.
On the other hand, a majority of voters continue to think Congress is spending recklessly, and cannot continue doing so.
That’s why Republicans won in a landslide in 2014.
Yet both claims cannot be right. It cannot be simultaneously true that we are all entitled to whatever we want, whenever we want it, to be provided by the government at an infinite expense; and, at the same time, that spending must be brought under control, and that people’s individual and property rights must come before those of an all-powerful government.
Contradictions always involve logical errors. Contradictions do exist in people’s minds, but never in reality. While one can evade contradictions for a time, one can only do so for so long.
The same is true whether we’re talking about an individual, or a society.
We can’t have it both ways. We can’t authorize Congress to spend indefinitely and exponentially, and be fiscally responsible at the same time. Sooner or later, something had to give.
It’s now official. Congress has given in. It’s literally saying, “We give up. The spending will continue. People want this free stuff, and that’s that.”
It’s beyond pork and fat. It’s beyond mere “waste.” It’s beyond spending.
The budget passed by Paul Ryan’s House of Representatives does not offer compromises between Obama’s agenda and the promises Republicans made in 2014. It’s Obama’s agenda all the way.
The budget is so much like one a Democratic Congress would have passed that Obama has been gracious towards Paul Ryan, while former Speaker Nancy Pelosi brags about how much they got.
The budget provides dollars, and in the process moral support, for Obama’s appeasement of Iran; for ensuring that Muslims, including Islamofascist radicals, can easily enter the country; for Obama’s use of executive orders to unilaterally rewrite immigration laws; for implementing economy-killing environmentalist policies through the EPA; and for funding of Planned Parenthood, forcing people who do not believe in abortions, or the practices of that organization, to pay for them.
Congress has “power of the purse.” It did not have to fund any of these things. It could have at least put up a fight.
No fight took place. Not a whimper, not a skirmish.
Years ago, when writing about Republican capitulation to Democratic presidents like FDR, JFK and LBJ, Ayn Rand wrote,
A “mixed economy” is a society in the process of committing suicide.
If a nation cannot survive half-slave, half-free, consider the condition of a nation in which every social group becomes both the slave and the enslaver of every other group. Ask yourself how long such a condition can last and what is its inevitable outcome.
We now know. In the analogy of suicide, Congress has pulled the trigger.
Now we enter the next phase. There are no restraints on government spending, not even nominal ones. The only restraint remaining is that of reality itself.
How can a currency and an economy continue on, with debt of this magnitude? We’re going to find out, because the debt will continue to escalate now that there are no more even theoretical limits on spending.
But it’s worse than that. We no longer have Republicans to keep Democrats in line, or even vice-versa. They’re on the same team. They’re one gigantic party. They agree on the fundamentals and even most of the specifics, it now seems, such as continued cuts in defense spending, government strangulation of the private economy, and appeasement and enabling of Islamic terrorists.
Divided government was the one thing that kept the “mixed economy” from totally collapsing. With Republicans and Democrats fighting it out on issues of national security and spending, the government was less able to do damage than it otherwise would have been.
Republicans have blinked, despite their landslide win just a year ago. Not just on one particular issue, but on the nature of government itself. Obama has established the precedent that a president may overrule Congress and rule – like a King, or a dictator – via executive order; and not only get away with it, but have it funded and enabled by the very Congress whose laws he ignores and rewrites.
The damage inflicted will be much worse than the impact of one particular trillion dollar budget. America is adrfit, lost at sea, with nobody but corrupt and dishonest morons to guide us.
However, the morons have not won. They have merely succeeded, for now. Reality always wins, in the end, because facts are stubborn things and you cannot evade them forever.
We’re still faced with an unconscionable federal debt, unsustainable entitlement programs, an economy not appreciably growing, and escalating Muslim terrorism back on our shores. Reality will not let us get away with our evasions. America’s pattern has historically been to wake up late in the process.
In the end, it always worked out, although there was a heavy price to pay for evasions prior to waking up. Will that pattern hold, or will this be the decline and end of America?
In due course, we will know.
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