Losing a family pet is
difficult…losing the same pet over and over again is
a different animal entirely. Let me explain. My two
little girls, Meagan and Chelsie, were both under
six when we owned two Golden Retrievers, Coke and
Pepsi. All that changed the day Pepsi was smashed by
a car. Not that I could have done anything, but I
was out of town the day Pepsi was killed, so
graveside services were delayed until my return.
Once I was home, all the family gathered in the far
corner of our lot as I dug a hole to lay Pepsi to
rest. It was an emotional time as the little girls
placed what each thought was Pepsi’s favorite chew
toy in with her. “I don’t want to go through that
again,” I thought to myself as I covered the grave.
End of story—well, not exactly.
Ten days later I glanced out the kitchen window and
saw Pepsi, or what was left of her, lying next to
the shed. Apparently, Coke had dug her up and
dragged her body back to the yard. Before anyone
noticed, I sprinted out of the house and re-buried
her. The next week Pepsi shows up once again, so I
buried her again. Coke made this a weekly ritual and
the 6th, 7th, and 8th burials were not nearly as
emotional as the first. By the 9th resurrection I
had had enough, so I tossed the shrinking and now
unrecognizable dried mass of hair and bone into the
garbage—Pepsi went to the landfill. (It is entirely
possible that after three burials I wasn’t burying
Pepsi at all and instead it was just some other
brown haired road kill Coke had dragged home. I
guess it really didn’t make much difference.)
For as long as I kept burying Pepsi, Coke kept
digging her up so this would have continued through
perpetuity unless I did something different. So I
did, and this is my point: If we always do what we
always did, we’ll always get what we always got.
When confronted with repeated problems you must
fundamentally change your approach to reach a
different outcome. Such is the exact case with
politics.
The groundwork to transform American free-market
capitalism into a nation based on Marxists
principles began with the 16th Amendment allowing
the confiscation of citizens’ wealth via income tax.
In 1913, the political slogan “Soak the Rich” was
coined and Americans earning over $500,000 were
taxed 7 percent. By 1936, the top marginal rate hit
a whopping 77 percent and this was the year the
first of a series of three shoes dropped.
In 1936, by a vote of five to four in the Butler
case, the US Supreme Court ruled Congress could tax
and spend money for any cause it considered
beneficial. This was the first shoe. Prior to
Butler, constitutional scholars had held all
revenues must be spent equally among the populace,
so this was a monumental leap advancing Karl Marx’s
theory of “from each according to his deeds; to each
according to his needs.”
The year after the Butler ruling, the second shoe
dropped—President Roosevelt’s massive wealth
redistribution program called Social Security. The
third shoe came in the form of Medicaid and Medicare
in 1965. Incrementally, these massive wealth
redistribution programs soon permeated every corner
of American society. With complete disregard to the
impossibility inherent in every Ponzi scheme,
citizens demanded benefits to which they felt
entitled. To be a hero, all politicians continued
soaking the rich and giving to the poor, even though
conservatives like British Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher warned “eventually we would run out of
other people’s money.” Perhaps we have.
By next year, 2012, Social Security, Medicare,
Medicaid and the interest payments on our national
debt will consume 100 percent of all tax revenues.
If government were to “Soak the Rich” by
confiscating 100 percent of all income above
$100,000 they would collect $3.4 trillion which is
still $330 billion less than President Obama is
planning to spend. Obviously, “Soaking the Rich” is
failing.
If we always do what we always did, we’ll always get
what we always got. It is time for a fundamental
change of government away from the Marxist
principles introduced in 1913 and back to the
free-market principles outlined by our founding
fathers. It took us nearly a century to bankrupt the
country so it will take nearly as long to restore
it—yet restore America we must.
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