January 10, 2015

Two challenges facing us--and an emperor who rules by decree

As civilization struggled to come to terms with the dozen executions in the capital of one of the world's most civilized nations, the Nigerian Muslim terrorist group Boko Haram killed two-thousand (2,000) men, women and children in the town of Baga in northern Nigeria. 

Business Insider calls it “one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in history.”  Probably true but western elites won’t notice because it happened in Africa.
According to a senior government official who spoke to the BBC, Baga, which once had a population of about 10,000 people, is now “virtually non-existent.”  The terrorist thugs razed an estimated 16 towns around Baga, according to the BBC.
“These towns are just gone, burned down,” Borno State Senator Ahmed Zanna told NBC News. “The whole area is covered in bodies.”
Meanwhile in Venezuela, the socialist government has dispatched the military to keep order in grocery stores.  The Guardian gives voice to the puzzlement of Venezuela’s central planners: ‘No one can explain why a rich country has no food.’

These two news items give a hint of the challenges facing us right now.  In response the emperor offers what he says is "free" community college to all.  And our "progressive" media laps it up. 

The last 30 years have lulled us into thinking there were no more storms, no more icebergs at sea. The long peace, prosperity, the dissolving of the Soviet Union, the fading of the threat of nuclear war convinced at least half of Americans that we no longer needed the sailors who originally operated our vessel.  Instead voters appointed the cruise director as captain.

No longer did we need to be concerned about navigation or seaworthiness--all we needed was lots of deck games, special events and other entertainments.

How else to explain the emperor's proposal for “free" community college for everyone?  Of course it wouldn't actually be "free"--someone would have to pay, just not the students.

At a time when Medicaid payments to doctors are being slashed to make budget deficits look better; when insurance premiums are being raised 30 percent to garner money for “subsidies” for others, when the defense budget is being cut to the bone and beyond, it is astonishing that people at the highest levels of government can propose yet another program to give prospective voters "something for nothing."
 
The shocking thing isn’t that Obama would propose a free lunch.  What's shocking is that he may actually believe it's "free."  It's how he's operated his whole life.

And if you think about it, that’s socialism in a nutshell:  In Venezuela nobody in the government seems to know where things once available in stores come from.  In Washington nobody in government knows how anything is paid for. 

Team Obama (and a lot of congress, for that matter) is filled with people who think they can make reality by decree.  They blithely ignore the laws of economics, supply and demand, human nature--and cling to the notion that reality will be whatever they personally order. 

None of them realizes they’re now passengers on a vast ship they’ve forgotten how to sail.

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Hat tip to the very perceptive Richard Fernandez.

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