Amerika

On social media a squawkmonkey was complaining that her health insurance costs had doubled and yet her deductible was still going up, meaning that she will pay more of out-of-pocket before the free healthcare kicks in.

You find yourself looking at these people with a look of incredulity. How could such marvels of stupidity exist? And yet most of our political discourse exists to promote the lies that free stuff exist, we can rule ourselves, and diversity will fill in the gaps.

At first, you saw editorials about how we could not afford the free stuff. The paleoconservatives, libertarians, and Anglo conservatives knew this was true. To their shame, the far-Right did not and the mainstream Right in an effort to be “bipartisan” and “moderate” went into denial.

Over the past eighty years, we have spent our future on our todays, and now we are bankrupt and in debt with a looming burden to rebuild. We ate the seed corn and now we are starving. In fact, by becoming seed corn eaters, we impoverished ourselves.

“Seed corn” means seeds for the crops for next spring. During long winters in caves and cave-like longhouses, ancient Europeans often found themselves eating roots and mushrooms to survive. The seed corn beckoned from the corner, but it was a Darwinistic trap.

Those who ate the seed corn had more pleasant winters, but then in spring were in trouble, and could be found stealing, borrowing, or buying seed from others. This put them in perpetual debt like the credit card users of today.

The really smart ones were able to clear enough land — removing rocks and stumps — to grow enough food to have overage so that they could make it through the winter even if not in opulence, and still have grain to trade for tools and supplies.

Nothing was free because everything involved time, money, and energy.

Even the freeish stuff like sunlight and rain was inconsistent and favored some areas over others. If your fields flooded or ran dry too quickly, your harvest was going to be meagre.

You could have free grain for awhile, but then you need to replace that seed corn in order to survive the next year. Maybe you could just hunt and gather during that time, but agriculture took over because it provided more consistent protein nutrition.

In our current age, we have been eating the seed corn, borrowing grain, and blowing off the costs for tomorrow. Most of our budget goes to the socialist-inspired “entitlements,” or programs that give money to citizens just for being alive and having some claim at victimhood.

Societies grew strong because their people learned to plan for the future. They weakened after jobs were introduced, and people merely had to show up to do repetitive tasks to get paid, because this required no future planning.

Things got worse when the taxes came about and government began the guarantor of survival. People no longer had to plan for seed corn at all, or even for job security.

The more they relied on the programs, however, the more popular they got, despite being unaffordable. The conversation went like this:

Voters: we want free stuff.
Nativists: we cannot afford this.
Voters: don’t care, just do it.

…time passes…

Voters: we are broke and my neighborhood is 75% foreign
Nativists: yes, that’s the cost of free

It is time to recognize the hand that oppresses us: the choices of the voters. They demand free stuff, ignore potential consequences, and then play the victim when they end up broke.

Free stuff requires more taxes. Those taxes are taken out of business, which passes the cost on to customers, and workers, who demand higher wages, and those costs are also passed on directly to consumers.

To compete on price with foreign companies, domestic firms offshore and outsource, automate, and otherwise cut staff which is usually their highest expense.

Each time government writes regulations, it hires bureaucrats and lawyers, and companies are forced to hire people to fill out paperwork. These people cost money and those costs go directly onto the price.

We had a brief respite where automation from Silicon Valley removed a lot of traditional jobs crusted in red tape like taxi drivers and food delivery. Over time, in came regulations, unions, taxes, and affirmative action, and soon the cost savings were much thinner.

Every country on Earth is making these errors. That was the post-WW2 compact, that everyone adopt the winning system. It had a few years before the costs really kicked in, and since that time the “American Dream” and analogues has perished.

Why have salaries stayed stagnant despite worker productivity going up? The answer is that the money goes to the taxes.

The voters wanted free stuff, and they got it, but like eating the seed corn, that means that the real cost will reveal itself later. And then people will be upset and claim this was done to them without their knowledge.

That is only partially true. The politicians can never tell you the long-term cost of any policy because if so voters would reject almost every policy, and politicians would have nothing upon which to build their careers.

For us to move forward, we have to lose the free stuff entirely, no matter how well-intended it was. Programs to end racism, poverty, drug use, and so on have not only not ended these problems but intensified them while costing hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

What would life be like without social security, medicaid, welfare, and subsidized housing? We seem to have accumulated a lot of people who do nothing but absorb state benefits and agitate, so we would be free of that agitation as they had to get real jobs.

Even more, however, we would have a functional economy again, and without the “free” stuff, be able to actually afford to live in this decaying hulk of a moribund civilization.

Tags: entitlements, seed corn, socialism, taxation