Wednesday - April 13, 2011

Food For Thought

I ran across two articles online this morning that I think are worth passing on. Both of the articles are straightforward, but both have comments that to me are more thought provoking than the articles themselves.



The first one is the NRO piece on the shelling of Fort Sumter, since yesterday was the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. It tells the story with an even hand and provides a bit of background. And then the comments begin.

We did some post on the Civil War here at BMEWS once upon a time a few years back, and got a rather hot response. From those comments I remember Turtler’s the best, that history shows the South had many years - decades - of prior foot stamping and hissy fit throwing to the point of threatening secession whenever the slavery issue came up in any form. Thanks for that.

The comments on this new post at NRO are well worth reading, although there are many and some are quite long. I’m going to combine and paraphrase the few that really struck me: after the Articles of Confederation didn’t work and our new Constitution was formed, not all the citizens of all the States took national citizenship to be their primary personal identifier. They considered themselves citizens of their own State first, and after that citizens of the United States. The State’s Rights Justification crowd stills toes that line, 150 years later, as the cause of the hostilities. They point out that no central government had the right to wield the power to strip citizens, and the States that represented them, of private property - slaves - merely by legislative fiat. They point out how this preeminent statist loyalty even caused problems within the Confederacy, and use the building of railroads as an example. But then another comment points out that at some point the central Confederate government offered manumission for all slaves willing to fight for the Cause, and to me that brings down that entire house of cards, because no mention of recompense to the slave owners was made. Made in that comment; did such a thing exist in the CSA edict of the day? I don’t know, but without it the argument becomes “We’re fighting this war of secession because the federal government doesn’t have the right to tell us what to do with our own property, so we’ll form our own new government that ... um ... has the right to tell us what to do with our own property.” Interesting reading, and you can read for a long time before the trolls start to get in the way.



The second article is the Pajamas Media piece on Social Security. Yes, SS is a shell game. A Ponzi scheme. It’s an entitlement program that the Supreme Court decided 51 years ago that you have no actual right to, so in other words it’s just another tax. That’s why the money goes into the general fund, and the SS “lockbox” is full of nothing but worthless IOUs. Years ago I read a piece, an apologista I now realize, that said that FDR dreamed up Social Security as a beneficent measure, and how a greedy and evil Legislature almost immediately appropriated the funds that in theory were supposed to be set aside. At some later time I read a similar article that pointed out that setting the money aside would have done little more than just tighten up the money supply, which would have furthered the Depression the nation was in at the time. It took one of the comments in today’s article to get me to read between the lines and realize that slick old FDR - the President of whom it was said he’d never tell the truth when a lie would suffice; and we know today what a Red / Socialist he really was - really had in mind. Had the Social Security money been set aside, put under the control of an oversight group, and invested in America, we’d all be Communists now. Huh? Well, think about it. The feds take 12% of every dollar earned by every working citizen, and they invest it. How? By buying stocks and bonds to support American business. How many workers, how many years, how much money? Scores of millions of workers, for more than 75 years, to the tune of untold trillions of dollars. The federal government, through the auspices of it’s oversight group, would have controlling ownership in just about every stock on the market. Whoever ran that oversight group would have more economic power than any tyrant who ever lived. Communism through Oligarchy (and how is that any different from what we have under Obama today?) Did Congress realize this at the time? I don’t know. But it was a beggar’s choice between absolute economic tyranny and an ever fruitful Money Tree to fatten up the federal coffers. Would taking a few billion and seeding an investment portfolio for every working citizen have been a better approach? Probably. But let’s remember that those were the days before computers, and it would have taken a massive army of accountants to track the contributions and worth of the hundreds of millions of individual accounts; even if the accountatnts were poorly paid that cost alone would have eaten up most of the profits. Putting the investment effort down at the payroll level would have been easier, but any investment scheme more complex than a CD would have required those same armies of bean counters, except that they’d all be working for the brokerages. There is no easy way out of the SS mess and there is not one legislator with the guts to touch this live wire, or the ability to avoid the rabid dogpile if he were to do so.

Posted by Drew458     on 04/13/2011 at 08:36 AM   
Filed Under: • Economics • History •  
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