What Future?

Most adults understand that life has few guarantees. How well folks see and accept this reality determines a great deal about how they operate in the world, including choices they make at the ballot box. What amazes me is that candidates make promises and people believe them. Politicians will say anything to gain support and thereby power. Politicians I can understand; they act in their own best interests, regardless of what they say. Those who believe them are harder to comprehend. Children usually trust what adults say, as long as they keep their word, but eventually we all learn that it's much easier to make a promise than to keep it. Even young adult voters should know this.

Before I continue, permit me to add this. If we actually held candidates to their promises and their “feet to the fire” when they didn't, we have them making far fewer empty promises. As long as enough of us are gullible and let them off the hook when the truth comes out, they will keep making the same kind of worthless promises. It's not enough to forgive “your guy” and proclaim the failures of “their guy.” Any leader, regardless of party or ideology, is worse than worthless if he or she is nothing more than a liar!

Campaign promises are regularly made and broken. Not surprisingly, some of us have become rather cynical about politicians, but why then aren't all voters far more skeptical ? Why are so many willing to spend their hard-earned money on snake oil salesmen? More to the point, why are so many Americans willing to give up their precious freedoms for empty promises and purposeful lies. The saddest, perhaps, are young voters, flocking to Barack Obama, convinced that they can have hope in a leader for the very first time. Good looks and smooth talk are typical traits of a con man. Why do they trust this one, especially as time and circumstances reveal his fecklessness?

What do people want? They generally want love, money, security, and health. Often we lump them all together and say, “a future;” but what future? Politicians haven't figured out, yet, how to promise us love, or they would be doing that, although insincere claims of caring and compassion come close. Many people connect money to jobs, so candidates promise jobs even though most jobs and all profit comes from private and not public labors. Profit provides income, which the government then taxes for its revenue. The government can only provide jobs by taking money in taxes to pay for them, which most politicians today are happy to do. This process is much like the goose who laid golden eggs. Free enterprise is the goose, and capitalistic profit is the goose's productivity. They point of the story is that killing the goose is not the best way to get rich, and neither is killing free enterprise by taxing it to death. The former Soviet Union tried, and it ended up an impoverished entity incapable of maintaining its existence. Much of the rest of the world has learned the lesson. Capitalism virtually ended religious conflict in Ireland, turning it into a marvel of prosperity. India and China both have turned to capitalistic activities, so much so that their enormous populations pose a huge threat in use of resources, such as oil. Even Africa is seeing similar movement, though many may not have heard over the never ending focus on war in the Sudan, AIDS, and starvation seemingly everywhere. Yet here in the United States, we seem driven like lemmings toward the suicide of socialism and the empty promises of self-serving politicians.

Many of their other assurances are also hard on the goose. Free health care is an impossibility. The government taking over the entire system will assure that it becomes less effective, more costly, and less accessible, which is the case in every country with so-called universal care. Efficiency maximizes profit. Profit encourages skill. Competition reduces prices. Freedom leads to innovation. Without efficiency, profit, competition, or freedom, health care becomes just another ineffective, user-unfriendly bureaucracy. The United States already has many of them—the Veterans Administration, the Social Security Administration, the Federal Housing Administration, and most state motor vehicle and welfare agencies.

Perhaps the scariest are the promises regarding security. If I were a cartoonist, I would illustrate here with a foolish-looking ostrich with head buried and tail feathers providing a splendid target. That is the frightening image that comes to mind as I listen to our benighted, so-called leaders offer their plans for dealing with foreign and domestic threats, largely from Islamic terrorists. A “religion of peace” didn't destroy the World Trade Center. Suicide bombings are not the tools of ordinary war or resistance. While a soldier may risk his life for his country or beliefs, only an insane person or religious fanatic will kill himself or herself to kill indiscriminately to create terror, believing “god” spoke to them and will reward them in paradise. Ignoring or sugar-coating such threats doesn't speak well for the wisdom or sanity of leaders promising to deal with them diplomatically. What kind of diplomacy, exactly, does one use with a mad man?

While the rest of the world is learning from us or flocking here to have what we have, we seem bent on emulating failures—the USSR, Europe especially France, and Mexico. This is another form of delusion. The Soviet Union collapsed and parts of it, at least, have rushed to adopt American-style constitutions, despite the fond, rearward looks of some hardliners. Europe needed our help to survive the last two wars and now seems committed to self-destruction from low birth rates, the thoughtless admission of Muslims with no desire to assimilate, and almost faddish anti-capitalistic policies on the environment, in particular. I suspect that elites here want what Europe used to be, even while we work toward the same suicidal policies. The question unanswered is whether we will drown ourselves in Islamic immigrants or Latino illegals, some of whom, both, despise America.

I have worked with and come to care deeply for both Latino and Muslim students. My concern is not from hatred or bigotry. I simply don't see in those cultures a better future than the one we have already created. Islamic countries are oppressive, third world throwbacks to the days of slavery, the subservience of women, and ignorance. Latin American countries have held on to domination by a few wealthy landholders and corrupt governments. Many who leave for the better conditions in the West are looking for us to adopt what they have sought to escape, so why are we? What kind of future is that?

I have been addressing the kind of future, the false promises that politicians make, and the gullibility of those who believe them or trust their ability to deliver what they promise. Of course, they nearly always promise utopia, a better future, and hope. The irony, right now, is the hope and change candidate that seems to offer the hope of a better future while at the same time saying we can't expect to enjoy the good things we have been accustomed to...like “our SUVs and food!”

In other words, besides meaningless promises, many candidates make promises for one thing while they support policies that are exactly oppose those same promises. They promise jobs and a better economy but advocate business-destroying regulation and prosperity-robbing taxation policies. Obama takes it one step further, daring to tell us we cannot expect to enjoy prosperity any more; we must sacrifice it for the rest of the world to have more, while we have less. {http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2008-05-25-1.html}

Like I said earlier, those who follow such ideas are like lemmings. Is there a self-destructive idea in this? We seem to have a large number of those with anti-American sentiments. They seem to believe the communist notion of capitalism that takes from others to profit itself (That sounds like politicians to me!). Many of the extremists on the Left endorse ideas that would damage us, and they not only accept but seem to want that. Start with global-warming, not science but a religion. Having a background in both, I recognize the difference. Solutions, a misnomer if ever there was one, all hurt the United States to the exclusion of pretty much every other country. Of course, they argue that we do the most damage so we owe the greatest compensation. If that were true, then all plans would include provisions to prevent other fast-growing economies like China and India from going where we supposedly have gone; they do not. In fact, we are the only nation, unless you count the declining communities of Europe, to accept our own self-destruction. Of course, they are more than willing to allow us to do so!

Look at every other movement—veganism, animal rights, alternative energy, even feeding the poor, to name a few—and you will see the same suicidal march, following almost religious ideology without waiting for the genuine confirmation of science, whether it's climate, nutrition, medical, genetic, or economic science. Let's face it. Numerous groups would like to create a future that is very different than the present, and, in my opinion, not a very attractive future. What is worse is that they want to determine a future for everyone rather than allowing us to enjoy the individual freedoms that enable us to make our own choices. Too many of our leaders and, surely, at least one of our presidential candidates have signed on. They promise change, but carefully listening to them suggests that the changes they will bring, if they can, won't please us, including many who follow them today. This goes beyond trusting their empty promises; this involves accepting the promises of an empty future. That is not the future I want. What future do you want?