Turning America into a Failed State

The patterns of a failed state are all too familiar from the Soviet Union, and every "Democratic People's Republic" from Cuba to North Korea . The government controls everything and the people control nothing. The largest employer is the government and its vast bureaucracy, while free enterprise is criminalized.

The government constantly announces new initiatives, plans and policies, which do nothing but breed more poverty and misery. An ever watchful government is constantly obsessed with domestic unrest, certain that if they can suppress opposition views, no one will notice how badly everyone but the government officials and the criminals live.

And now it's all coming to America.

Want to buy a pickup truck? Pretty soon you might not be able to. You will however be able to buy lightweight cars jointly owned by the government and the worker's union that will peel open if you sneeze on them. (If nothing else, Obama will be remembered for turning the American auto industry into the Yugo and the Lada.)

Because the government knows best. Always. And who needs small businesses anyway? Unless you qualify for Small Business affirmative action quotas, which entitles you to cut in line when bidding on government contracts, you have no business running a small business anyway.

But don't worry, you will be able to buy a small assortment of overpriced products from the remaining industries, underfunded by government loans and grants, with prices artificially inflated by cap and trade and all the other fun taxes. Forget the old kind of big business. The new kind of big business doesn't actually make money, instead it's subsidized by the government, which it has to be because it's so heavily taxed and the prices passed down to consumers are so awful, that there's no way for it to turn an actual profit. And of course forget about product quality. When your union owns the company, no one cares about product quality.

Naturally the government will step in to regulate excessive prices to protect the citizenry, artificially lowering the prices for some staples, and applying more "sin taxes" to anything the government doesn't like, including fattening foods and owning an antiquated gas guzzler. This is a formula for creating shortages, as Chavez has most recently demonstrated for us. And shortages mean a crisis... and we wouldn't want to waste one of those.

Is this a farfetched vision of the future or a probable vision of the present? We'll find out soon enough.

In the Obama Administration, "efficiency" is the new poverty, implementing controls and regulations that leave people with less than ever before. In the name of environmental efficiency, the American people are to be deprived of transportation, deprived of jobs, deprived of income and deprived of freedom.


The disastrous failures of FDR and Carter's attempts at implementing price controls highlight what is to come. But to social liberals, an economic downturn has always been a perfect storm of an opportunity to seize control of the free market in order to fund the construction of their socialist infrastructure.

Now the environment has provided a "moral structure" to enforce political change, and to proceed with the impoverishment of America. The environment is of course a perfect justification for just about anything, since any worsening of the human condition serves to "benefit the environment", right down all the way to genocide, or its more euphemistic cousin, Zero Population Growth.

Efficiency has come to be a euphemism for deprivation, and community, for a welfare state. And the more the government does, the more it controls, and the more it controls, the more it imposes its dictates. National health care will mean a government that feels more entitled than ever to dictate every detail of how you live your life, right down to the food you can eat.

Environmentalism however goes beyond even that, providing carte blanche for government control and oversight over every human activity, in the name of a mythical global crisis that doesn't actually exist. Want to take a plane trip? If the environmentalists have their way, you'd better have a good "approved" reason for it. Vacation? Family reunion? You know you're limited to one of those a year. Better not try a second flight. You won't want your selfishness to destroy the environment, now do you?

And with a government bureaucracy busy regulating everything, there will be more jobs for the regulators, and less jobs for the regulated. And the welfare state that was predicted in the 70's, in which everyone would be either collecting welfare, or dispensing welfare, will have come to pass.

The cheerful comeback of the same policies Carter pushed of course can only bring poverty and misery, turning America into a failed state. Rationing in the name of the environment, government control in the name of economic stabilization and equality, have already done serious damage to the American economy. More control will squash it entirely, moving us on the socialist express to economic oblivion.

And of course the worse things get, the tighter government control becomes in order to "compensate" and "stabilize" some more, like a drunk driver who keeps hitting the gas, under the intoxicated impression that if he just keeps going faster, the world will stop turning around him. And he won't stop, until he crashes and crashes hard.

The more the government controls, the less productive the American economy becomes. And since expanding government bureaucracy is a parasite that consumes wealth without producing it, the economics of the situation can only trend downward.

Thus government gains power at the expense of Americans. The government bureaucrat rises. The ordinary American sinks down. Power shifts permanently from the citizens to the system. And the best way to make that power shift permanent is to eliminate any possibilities for independence from government control.

Transforming America into a failed state means putting the final nail in the coffin of American freedom. We can either have an economy based on individual liberty or one based on centralized government control. We've struggled through with a hybrid fusion of the two for a while now, but a hybrid system will tug one way or another.The current crisis has been exploited to draw us into the socialist quagmire. And the American economy is sinking in.