EDITOR:
God help us if we as an electorate get this wrong. As H. L. Mencken wrote so eloquently in the last century: "The aim of all practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
With that in mind I would like to proceed on the illusion and the fact of government in the 21st century.
Contrary to popular rhetoric our national government was founded as a republic, not a democracy with the ratification of the Constitution on Sept. 17, 1788, by the original states. No sooner was that prime directive installed as the law of the land, than its circumvention and dismantling began. The deconstruction began with the Whisky Rebellion in 1791 and is continuing until this very day with laws instituted by Obama Health Care and everything in between.
Along the way the electorate became convinced that through the government they could feather their nest by insisting that the political class provide them with largess, not realizing that there is no free lunch. Thus after the war of secession (civil war) the Republic was mortally wounded and the union of previously free and sovereign states became subservient to the all mighty federal government. Afterward it became a simple matter of completing a transformation to a democracy in order for the super state to become all powerful.
Much of that was accomplished in 1913 with the passage of the 16th and 17th constitutional amendments along with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act effectively rendering the original document practically irrelevant. However the political class was not yet finished. After his election in 1932 FDR and his cohorts set about establishing democratic socialism, first by confiscating the real wealth of the citizenry, namely gold, and by implementing the New Deal, the cornerstone of which was economic policy based on the radical theories of John M. Keynes.
Keynes convinced our federal officials that the way to prosperity, even in a depression, is to flood the economy with newly created dollars and in essence spend ourselves to prosperity. We've seen how well that works lately. For example, it now currently takes $97 to equal the buying power of a 1913 dollar.
The system works great for the government, especially in repaying their debts.
There is not a revenue problem for our governments, local, state, and federal, only a spending problem.
That spending problem is a problem of us - the electorate who pays taxes via the taxation system and the hidden system, inflation.
Since almost everyone receives some sort of government benefit whether it is an interest investment credit on property or a downright cash subsidy, we are in essence co-dependents to a spending addicted political class.
As any addiction therapist will tell you the addict e.g.: the government, cannot escape his addiction until the co-dependent no longer facilitates (supports) the addict. In plain simple language it's way past time for us the citizenry to cease demanding any sort of largess from our bankrupt government and it's time to remove the parasites from office who have been feeding off our wealth, diminishing though it may be.
C.V.Sledd Shearer
Gardnerville
