"The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy for those who think" Horace Walpole
In the wake of the Massachusetts election, I found it extremely humorous to see all the so-called experts change their analysis overnight. They were trying to sound like they knew what was going to happen all along. Once again, like the politicians themselves, all the experts were wrong and most of them still are. I hope you will entertain my humble opinion as I try to explain what forces caused this to happen.
After World War II, the US emerged as the only industrialized country not decimated by war. We were in the position as the only superpower in the world with the greatest military force in the history of the world. The world looked to us to help them rebuild and we built the things that did it. As a result we became the wealthiest country in the world. The only threat was the socialist nations of China and the Soviet Union. As we found out later, they were not as powerful as advertised and were never a bigger threat than we could handle. President Eisenhower warned us in his farewell address against not only the "Military Industrial Complex" but in the same speech he gave the following, lesser known, warning:
"Americans must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow" - Dwight D. Eisenhower
However, the generation that won the war and the generations that followed did not heed either warning.
The "Baby Boomers" grew up in times of unlimited possibilities and credit. They gradually grew into power with the ability of borrowing tomorrow's money to cure all social ills and disparities. Soon our financial elite began to sell our nations true wealth, our industrial and manufacturing base, to the highest foreign bidder. We saw them all come and go: the Europeans, the middle east oil barons, the Japanese, and now the Chinese. When we had no more industries to sell, we began to sell our children into debt.
Our businessmen's greed was only matched by our politicians desire to create larger and more grandiose government sponsored programs. These programs were used to buy the votes of the people with promises of curing everything.The programs never seemed to be able fixed what they were created to fix. The unintended consequences of the programs created more problems that required the politicians to fix with more costly programs. We declared wars on poverty, crime, drugs, hunger, ignorance, terror, etc. We never won any of these wars and only seemed to end up with more wars.
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