06-13-2019, 07:37 AM
(06-12-2019, 10:32 PM)Dutch Wrote: If the US was free, peaceful, had a booming economy, had a balanced budget, had sound money, had safe streets, had no minimum wage, and taxes imposed by all levels of government took less than 10% of our income in the past, are Americans happier now that the USA is a police state, at war, has a dead economy, is in debt, has a minimum wage, and high taxes?
A police state and a welfare state are two very different things. The Soviet Union was a police state without a welfare state; South Africa under Apartheid was a police state for non-whites but a welfare state for whites; Chile under Pinochet was a police state trying to gut a welfare state. It is possible to have a police state that is also a welfare state, as in Castro's Cuba.
Balanced budgets occurred as late as the 1990s in part because the federal government needed not spend so much money defending against the dreaded Soviet thrust through the Fulda Gap or across the North German Plain in a drive to Brittany and Gibraltar. Sound money? That was the euphemism for the gold standard that created a more capricious economy that had to contract when gold got exported. Safe streets? Back in the days of Irish immigrant gangs in America in the 1860s? No minimum wage? Just the thing you need for debt bondage on the Plantation.
Lower taxes? Those were possible when most people dropped out of school after 'solid eighth-grade educations' to be child labor, and when roads were two-lane blacktops also known as 'Blood Alley'. Do you know anyone who wants to return to the 1920s? That is how I interpret "Make America Great Again".
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.