0903 Trojan Crisis
A recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal by Bradley Schiller offered some much needed perspective for our country’s present tribulations. According to Schiller, in 2008 theU.S.economy lost 2.2 percent of her labor force; the same level as in 1982. In the midst of the Great Depression, 1932, the rate was over three times that level at 7.1 percent.
America’s present unemployment level is at around 7.6 percent but in 1982 it peaked at 10.8 percent. By contrast, 1932 was able to end the year at 25.2 percent.
Even though 2008 saw a bad fourth quarter, our nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) rose in each of the previous three quarters completely off-setting her fourth quarter losses. Between 1930 and 1932 the United States GDP declined by a total of 30 percent.
Things in the automotive and banking sectors are not good at the moment but also deserve some perspective. It is true that 2008 experienced a sickly production decline of about 25 percent and that according to Schiller, “a couple of dozen ” banks failed. But there were more than three thousand bank failures from 1987 to 1988 and over ten thousand failures in 1932. Automobile production dropped by 90 percent in 1932.
Americais now being led down a path of, according to President Obama, change we can believe in. The problem is that the change we are to believe in is being thrust upon us through a campaign of baseless fear-engendering rhetoric, historical half-truths, outright deception and Democratic imperialism.
Passage of the new so-called stimulus package was accomplished by ingeniously propagandizing a national emergency that does not exist. Recently President Obama, the most influential leader in the free world, used the word “crisis” twenty five times in one short speech. The foundations for establishing Europe’s failing democratic socialism inAmerica was surreptitiously laid through the specter of crisis multiplied twenty-five times.
Fear is always irrationality’s best decision-making weapon, especially if the motivating deception is sprinkled with just enough truth to make it believable. People behave according to what they believe. If they believe they cannot, they will not. If they believe they can, they will. President Obama and Congress’s majority have now fleshed out the idea that only government can fix us. By doing so, they have exposed their beliefs that Americans “cannot”; that they are inept or stupid or lazy or all three.
There may yet be a true crisis, but it will only exist because the wisdom of past victories over difficult circumstances will have been flagrantly shunned in favor of an increasingly heavy hand of government. Despite revisionist claims, at least three times in the past , under good leadership, American citizens saved the day, not government. Coolidge, Eisenhower and Reagan all managed to institute genuine tax relief, reduce unemployment and turn the economy around – all the while reducing government intrusiveness and keeping our enemies at bay.
Freedom and government share an inversely proportional relationship. Freedom and prosperity thrive as government diminishes to its divinely ordained role. The more government grows in order to “give”, the more it takes away.
In contradiction to what liberal historians and lift-leaning pundits constantly foist on the public, our founders understood as did the authors of all fifty state constitutions that without the fear of God, government would not understand or reverence free people, their value or their abilities. It would usurp its proper role, always grasping more power at the expense of the liberty.
When government does not reverence the people, tyranny becomes the future and the people become fodder for fear mongers and despots. Liberty is a hard taskmaster. It survives and grows along a narrow path of moral purity, selfless service, personal responsibility and a deep awe by government of the people it serves.