Hunker Down!
Recently, Doug Casey of Casey Research was interviewed and the topic of Presidents came up. Here is a bit of what Doug had to say.

Q: Doug, we spoke about holidays in general last time, but I've heard you say, specifically, that you find Presidents' Day particularly objectionable. I know that's not just you being a gadfly, but a comment driven by your study of history and your thinking on psychology, sociology, and economics. It seems worth following up on.

Doug: Yes, that's true. For one thing, as we discussed in our conversation on anarchy, political power tends to attract the worst of people, the four percent of any society that's sociopathic. So declaring holidays to honor these people is a tragic mistake in and of itself. It, like so many things are in our world, is completely perverse, as people celebrate and reward mass murderers, industrial-scale thugs, and con-men who fleece entire societies.

Who is studied and idolized in the history books? Is it people like Edison, the Wright Brothers, Leonardo, Newton, Ford, or Pasteur? Not really; they just get a passing nod. The ones who get statues built to them and are engraved on the collective memory are conquerors and mass murderers – Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and a whole bunch of U.S. presidents.

Q: Do you ever get to thinking that perhaps people get the government they deserve?

Doug: I do indeed. People who vote for free lunches – knowing full well that someone needs to pay for them, and they are fine with that as long as the someone is someone besides themselves – deserve to become tax slaves for those who view them as milk cows. If economically ignorant, greedy, and shortsighted people vote for bad government, they should start by looking in the mirror when they wonder what went wrong. But few people are that introspective. Further, most people apparently lack a real center, an ego in the good sense. That's why they create these false gods to worship; by becoming part of a group, they think they gain worth. Pity the poor fools…

There's no doubt in my mind that the U.S. has devolved to that level. Something like 43 million people get their food from the government, about half of workers pay no income taxes (although I wish no one did, of course), about half are significant net recipients of government funds… and many millions more are employed directly by the state. It's why I no longer refer to "America" when discussing the U.S. – America was a wonderful idea, which unfortunately no longer exists.

A bad leader can bring out the worst in people, making them think the government is a cornucopia; and then the people demand more of the same from future leaders. It's a downward spiral – never, for some reason, an upward spiral. It's why, after Augustus, Rome never returned to being a republic, even though they pretended – just like the U.S. does today. My conclusion is that people basically get the kind of government they deserve. Which is a sad testimony to the degraded state of the average person today.

[end of interview]

So, to all my conservative Bible-believing friends out there who think these upcoming elections might have a chance of bringing back the old America we grew up in, you are missing the bigger picture. Truth is, the problem is with the people, not the politicians, and no amount of political action is going to change what we have devolved into.

If you really want to make a difference then start at the individual level. When we begin with ourselves, changing our own hearts, one at a time, then, we might have a chance. Short of that, it's all over but the cryin'. "Go ye therefore......" and bring about change one person at a time.

Until then, buy gold and hunker down! It's about to get ugly.

DT.