If you take to heart the Legacy Media, you’d be forgiven (not really) for thinking Russia is responsible for not only Trump (despite, of course, Hillary being one of the most unelectable candidates in American history), but also your microwave shorting out and your cat getting hit by a truck last week.
The Neocons and the Neoliberals (but I repeat myself) want to relive the Cold War -- they want to revive the USSR and put an even scarier mask on it.
The populace doesn’t seem freaked out enough, it seems -- a new Arms Race, perhaps, to tickle the national amygdala?
We need a new enemy to distract us from the real problems. A grand conspiracy to fight against to forget the real grand conspiracies. We need the war drums to be heard ‘cross the nation.
(To Trump’s credit, he’s been showing restraint against the warmongers.)
Perpetual conflict perpetually legitimizes further federal encroachment into your life and continued federal spending. (See: waste.)
It’s the same old trick.
Indeed, since the Civil War, we’ve seen more and more consolidation and closer and closer government-business partnerships. The most dramatic shifts have been in times of conflict -- when everyone is too busy envisioning the apocalypse to notice the smell of the Constitution burning.
What had been, through a tiny window before the Gilded Age, a decentralized and marginally laissez-faire market has become a heap of consolidated power. And at root of this centralization is one “radical” idea.
PROPERTY IS THEFT
Yesterday, we spoke about how the postmodern mind believes words are subjective shapeshifters -- words can take on any meaning the postmodern brain gives to them.
The world, through this lens, becomes much simpler. For no other reason than reality can apparently bend to their opinions.
Liberalism, for example, has been flogged and abused so badly we don’t even recognize it anymore.
Today’s “liberals” scream for censorship, corporate welfare, a perpetual military-industrial apparatus and government controlling the means of production. A far cry from the original definition of liberal, which now must be referred by true liberals as “classical liberalism” so to avoid the embarrassment of being lumped in the same tribe as the likes of AntiFa or John McCain.
Pointing out these things, though, to today’s liberal is futile. Words mean nothing and everything. Only the battleground is important. And, at root, the liberal’s real tiff, you’ll find, is with people owning things. The real problem, they say, is property.
Property is theft -- an authoritarian idea implanted in their minds by… guess who?
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM
What our “revolutionaries” don’t realize is this “property is theft” meme is far from revolutionary -- it’s the status quo. It’s what the government has been spoon-feeding the populace for over a century, and viciously shoving down the throats of college students for at least half that time.
All the while, Americans have been bombarded with a florid array of licenses, taxes, fees, subsidies, red tape and regulations -- all in violation of private property rights. Nobody in America privately owns property or the means of production anymore... they rent it from the government.
And, thus, the revolutionaries are right. Property is now a form of theft -- most egregiously in the form of property taxes. Pay or we take away. The reverse Robin Hood.
It’s how government has been able to steal from the money-poor (but property-endowed) and give to itself for the past century. It’s the socialist’s gift that just keeps on taking.
So, the next time someone says we’re living through “Late-Stage Capitalism,” tell them property is theft and give them a fist bump.
(They won’t know how right they really are.)
And then feel free to correct them…
“No. It’s Late-Stage Socialism, dummy.”
And hopefully we’ll see it fall by the wayside much sooner than later.