Again, wasn't it Madison who said this only works with a moral people? We don't have that. Even in 1776 there were bad actors but do you think what's going on now would have been tolerated? I don't think so! Would it have been put up with in 1950? No.
If you're right, then the main battlefield is spiritual/religious. Which if you take a look over my post history in the last several years, is what I've been constantly harping on. This is not just politics anymore. It's spiritual. We need a renaissance of biblically-based Christianity in this country, because that's what it was built on. We've since gotten distracted with Yoga and Wicca and every new-fangled thing to come down the pike. Sure, the other religious perspectives are free to exist, but they are objectively inferior in terms of not only moral teachings but, even more importantly, their theological view of God, humans and society. A nation of people living in religious delusion is guaranteed to be unfit for a republic based on individual accountability and self-determination.
Now, I agree with you about many of the causes but that's another issue and will take longer to reverse, if it happens, which is doubtful. This is like debating how it came to be that Jeffery Dahmer ate people instead of locking his ass up first. On the one had, everything you brought up needs addressing/fixing and, on the other hand, the results of bad actions/not doing the right things have to be dealt with, now.
OK and "First do no harm". The VERY first step is to stop causing new/fresh injuries. If someone is in a severe roadside collision and they are injured and in need of EMT, the first step is to let go of their ankle and stop dragging them along the side of the road causing new injuries to their spine/whatever. So, the first step that WTP need to take is to put a full-halt, forthwith, to all expansionary measures. That means: stop printing new money, stop expanding government expenditures, stop increasing government revenues, stop issuing subsidized credit to banks/etc. stop increasing regulations, stop making new laws, stop approving new weapons systems, stop deploying more troops, stop opening new theaters of war, etc. etc. etc. Also, do not allow the Fed to trigger a deflationary collapse... they need to be "freeze-framed" and forced to maintain exact
ceteris paribus until WTP decide through Congress what to do with them and how to disband them. IOW, stop dragging the poor collision victim along the pavement and causing more and more massive new injuries. Once we STOP making new injuries, we can start the discussion over how to prepare for the arrival of the EMT, i.e. how to reverse the past century+ of ever-increasing damage that has been done by layers upon layers upon layers of government corruption and misguided interventions.
I completely disagree that the problems are exaggerated. When in your life do you remember all of these homeless drug addicts living on the streets of American cities?
That's not what I meant. What I mean is that they are taking a self-solving problem and they are characterizing it in terms of something that "WE need to stop." Self-solving problems can usually just be solved by freeing up private parties to defend their own property. When a homeless person gets shot and killed for trespassing in the loading dock of a local business, and the police arrive and say, "Good job, we need private citizens to defend their property so the whole burden is not on us", and no charges are pressed, the rest of them will flee like a flock of birds to some new destination. I don't have anything against the homeless, I've been homeless myself at one point. It can happen to anyone, most Americans do not realize how thin the line between themselves and homelessness. But these scourges are always the result of prior bad policy, and then the ruling class just uses the scourge itself as excuse to call for
even more bad policy to fix the previous bad policy. This is the cycle of modern omnipotent government that has been going on, unchecked, for over a century.
I don't want my freedoms impinged upon for a war on drugs but I'm saying that when man made dangerous drugs are legalized then you lose freedom because of mentally ill, drug addicted, violent lunatics become a threat to sane human beings.
But, just as with guns, the issue isn't legalization versus illegalization. When I was in the homeless shelter, I understood by firsthand observation why government policies are powerless to do anything about most of these problems: people who are already homeless have nothing left to lose, so they simply don't give a damn
what laws you pass. "What are you gonna do to me, feed and house me in a jail for 3 months? Pffft." That's not a caricature, that's literally what they joke about in the soup-line. Obviously, they don't like getting harassed by the cops, and they don't enjoy being in jail, but it's not "the end of the world" for them, as it is for the suburbanites who are proposing and passing these laws. The whip crack stings the suburbanite because they have a lot to lose... house, cars, family, and so on. But that same whip is a wet noodle on the homeless. And short of becoming Saudi Arabia, that's
never going to change. So what has to actually change is the first point you made above: our morality. Our hearts are what has to change. This is a spiritual problem, not a political one! And that shouldn't be surprising since, when the boomers hit adulthood, America was still deeply religious, as it had been for centuries. In the span of just over 1 generation, we went from being one of the most religious countries in the world, to being one of the most secular. And we have been in free-fall decline on every social measure since then, in direct proportion to our abandonment of God. This is basically just the Old Testament, 2024-edition.
How free are people in San Francisco who have to leave their car windows down and hatch backs/trunks open so one of the degenerates doesn't smash the windows? How free are little kids or adults that have to walk through dangerous homeless encampments and filth to go about wherever they live? When I was young and living at home, my parents subscribed to National Geographic.
They are free to relocate, purchase insurance, hire a valet or personal security, etc. I'm not being facetious, the point is that these problems are not really unsolvable, they are problems where the only solution is to, as I remember being famously scrawled across Paris Hilton's shirt: "STOP BEING POOR." So, we see yet again how the destructive effects of inflation, taxation, regulation and all the accoutrements of the modern omnipotent State have made us all much poorer than we ever realized. There was an economic value to knowing that you lived in a neighborhood where nobody was going to be skimming down the street peeking in your windows for any unsecured bags in cars and doing a smash&grab. And so on, and so forth. As those safeties began to disappear, we were like the frog being boiled alive. Since we could still afford liquor, smokes and Blockbuster rentals on the weekend, nobody noticed that we were actually being robbed blind. Now that the problem has become so enormous that it is visible from space, even the ostriches with their heads firmly buried in the sand can't ignore it any longer.
I remember an issue on Bombay India that showed pics of this city with sky scrapers and other modern things you'd see in a big city, with people living on the sidewalks, in view of those buildings, in cardboard boxes with other trash as roofs for them. I was stunned that something like that could exist and at what a $#@!hole the place was. Now, we're there! So, no, it's not exaggerated.
I'm not saying that stuff is exaggerated! That was a separate point regarding how the propaganda machine self-propagates the call for new bad policies to fix the old bad policies. Anyway, yes, the 3rd world has come here because that's precisely what the globalist Marxists have been using those oceans and oceans of cash they print up at the Federal Reserve to do. The globalists explicitly laid out a multi-step plan to bring America down to the global average (economically) and simultaneously bring up all other countries to par with it. They need every country in the world to be "equal" with every other country, so they can institute global Marxism, where every person is equal (income) with every other person... except, of course, the Party members who will live like gods, driving over the rest of us peons like ants on the pavement. So, the purpose of the Fed is not merely to steal Americans' wealth (and do nothing with it) but, rather, to use subtle channels to export it to China, India, South America, Africa and many other parts of the world, under various guises, but primarily in order to disempower Americans and empower the corrupt elites everywhere around the world. In this way, the "shining city set on a hill" as a beacon of light proving that freedom founded on the Gospel leads to peace and prosperity, can be snuffed out and made into just another shithole like all the other shitholes in the world...
