Once there was a holy man in India who summoned two of his followers and gave them each a live chicken.
"Take the chicken somewhere where no one can see and kill it," he told them.
The first man went behind a fence and killed his chicken. The second man returned two days later with his chicken.
"Why have you not killed the chicken?" asked the guru.
"Everywhere I go, the chicken sees." Was the reply.
Our nation has reached a similar dichotomy between thinking and not thinking. Like the first man most politicians, and the electorate for the most part, just automatically respond to every problem with an unthinking response; the government will fix it. Thats the way its been since Herbert Hoover tried to intervene in a financial panic. His 'fixes' made things much worse and caused the election of a truly destructive president, FDR, who turned Hoover's blunders into permanent institutions, thus ensuring that a sharp economic downturn would become a very severe decade-long Depression and that the 'fixes' he imposed would become the prototypes for a metastasizing cancer of government 'solutions' into the next century.
Since then nearly every politician has responded to real and fake crises by unthinkingly adding on to the overlarded structure of the state without considering the ultimate effect these actions would have on the whole society. Every time some interest group has made a fuss the avatars of Big Government have gone behind the fence and killed the chicken. But is that the path of wisdom?
Now we're moving into a crisis that is a result of giving in to our unthinking responses. We've wrecked sector after sector of our society by the government sticking its nose in where it doesnt belong and taking away the ability of people to affect the way things are done in their lives. But remember-- the Chicken Sees! You cant continue to dismantle our tradition of individual achievement, respect for property rights and political freedom and still have the powerful, wealthy society which was the result of that flowering of freedom and the empowerment of the individual. The Chicken-killers are eying the health care industry as their next target, ignoring the almost universal failure of government health care wherever it has been tried. It always leads to poor care and national bankruptcy. The schools have already been destroyed by over-Federalization. Agriculture and energy have been crippled or distorted by bloated subsidies and draconian regulations. Liberal unions and government ecology bureaucrats are dealing a death-blow to the domestic auto companies. The government has become stocked with parasites who just dream of 'putting in their time' and retiring in their fifties on a nice fat indexed-for-inflation pension, and maybe a double-dip into Social security while they're at it. As the private sector comes apart from the hammer blows of taxation, overregulation and skyrocketing commodity prices the bureaucrats breed like rabbits in their air conditioned offices, secure in the knowledge that the supply of goodies in Big Brother's trick bag is endless.
But The Chicken Sees!
Giant pension funds like CALPERS (the California Public Employees Retirement System) will be overwhelmed by hyperinflation, which will destroy the real value of their paper holdings, and a wave of early retirements caused by a crushing budget deficit in the state. One day the happy recipients of taxpayer largess are going to go to their mailboxes and find that their fat pension check has been replaced with a notice that the state that they thought was as solid as the rock of Gibraltar is suspending payments. They will have seen it happen already to pensioners of the Big Three automakers, people who worked for the airlines and members of the Steel unions but MY GOD! the state cant run out of money, can it? Why is that annoying chicken staring at me?
So here we are. The wave of hyperinflation that had been in the distance is drawing closer and assuming the proportions of a tsunami. The broken educational system has ensured that the general population has no historical memory of either economic depression or inflation; the memories of the horrible Carter years, which were mild compared to what's coming, have been tossed down the Memory Hole by the embarrassed liberals who cant have their track record honestly discussed. Even the Boomers, who were alive then and old enough to remember have only a foggy recollection of how bad things got, how close we came to the precipice.
The situation will achieve critical mass in 2010. Whoever is president will have a Congress run by two of the most moronic idiots ever to surface in leadership positions in human history; Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. These hapless chicken-pluckers will go behind the fence and kill the Bush Tax Cuts. They will impose the Cap and Trade Global Warming scheme that Barbara Boxer was pushing this year and they will begin pushing destructive price controls on the pharmaceutical industry. There will be a massive capital flight and a flight from the dollar. Ponzi schemes like Social security, indexed to megainflation, will suck everything down with them.
I'm putting some chicken coops up in my backyard. At least I'll have someone to talk to.