Inflation, Invasion, and Crime — Oh, My!
Inflation, invasion, and crime — oh, my! The next few months and years don't look particularly appealing. As central bank money-printing and unsustainable U.S. government spending combine with the world's nascent decoupling from the dollar as the global reserve currency to reveal just how worthless greenbacks are when not linked to real commodities such as gold, it is becoming undeniable that tough economic times lie ahead. Let's go, Brandon!
The Biden-Obama Gang has decided to respond to this unfolding crisis by spending more money on interest group welfare and crony capitalist pork-barrel projects, drilling for far less energy here at home, and becoming more dependent on the energy production of our enemies, including those we're already none too subtly engaging in open warfare. Not surprisingly, these moves will only usher in greater inflation and dollar debasement.
At the same time, the Marxist left's strategic use of mass illegal immigration to destroy American communities, weaken political opposition, and dissolve national unity is set to get much worse as the few remaining Trump administration security checks on an otherwise open southern border are replaced with overt inducements to break U.S. immigration law, including federal promises of free health care, cross-country relocation services, and public indoctrination (I mean education).
Homicides, thefts of personal property, and other violent crimes — already reaching grisly record milestones in cities across the country — will naturally continue to skyrocket as the combined effects of our economic and illegal immigration crises snowball together. This is not a pretty picture. It's the kind of opening movie text you expect to read before sitting back with a tub of popcorn to watch Snake Plissken struggle to survive post-apocalyptic America during his Escape from New York or L.A. (both pretty good life moves right now, by the way).
So here's our sobering reality: the economic system, as we know it today, is headed for a crash. The political system may well follow suit. Both crashes have been in the works for some time. And many of America's most wealthy and politically powerful have helped put the whole catastrophe into motion. It is true that power is like a pyramid whose apex is reached only by two kinds of animals: eagles and reptiles. Unfortunately for Americans, the reptiles have flourished and devoured our eagle population to near extinction.
If you're not certain which of our tormentors have their fingerprints on this mess, look for the same people who build walls and security perimeters around their offices; engage in unbridled censorship; habitually call their fellow Americans "traitors," "extremists," or "terrorists"; and routinely escape punishment for their own crimes while using the same criminal "justice" system to persecute their ideological foes. Generally speaking, if an individual is regularly addressed in government committee hearings as "the Honorable so-and-so," it is more likely than not that the same person has acted dishonorably to subvert the United States Constitution and distort the rule of law during the course of "so-and-so's" career. In American politics these days, just as within American finance, the worse you are as a person, the better off you will become.
This last observation is not unique to our time. One of the remarkable achievements of our Founding Fathers was their profound appreciation for human nature and sin. In their writings and committee debates, they surveyed thousands of years of human history and took ample opportunity to note the recurring deficiencies in government systems that eventually triggered those systems' collapse. Among their considered observations regarding the events leading to their break with England, as well as those events that had led to the fall of great nations in the distant past, they were in agreement that concentrated power always begets outright government tyranny and the surrender of God-given personal freedoms.
In contrast to the Biden-Obama Gang's celebration of institutional authorities, our Founding Fathers went to great pains to recognize that delegated powers remain at all times a threat to the lives and liberties of those governed. Rather than adoring professional government as the Marxist Brandon-Obama Gang does, the men who laid the bedrock of our current system saw it as a necessary evil. From this vantage point, they struggled to devise a government that was exceptional due not to its various powers, but rather to its functional limitations. Our Constitution is explicit in describing the few duties to be performed by government agents and equally explicit that, except when performing those few delegated responsibilities, the government has no power to abridge the innumerable inalienable rights and liberties of each citizen, whether or not those inherent freedoms are enumerated explicitly in the Bill of Rights. The U.S. Constitution is both a ball and chain intended to keep government power in check and a revolutionary document safeguarding powers held solely by the people. That its clear intent has been abrogated by an activist Judiciary, a corrupt Congress, and the authoritarian overreaches of several presidencies without a proper reckoning from the people has only emboldened the U.S. government to further betray its own charter.
In effect, the Founding Fathers grasped that the only way to prevent tyranny and preserve liberty is to diffuse power as much as possible across the entire population. For those obligations that require the formal architecture of government, the answer is to maintain an equilibrated system that keeps power balanced by forcing officeholders to remain in continuous competition with each other. As Milton Friedman noted two centuries later, "Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing, either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office." In other words, when the deficiencies of human nature are directed against each other to prevent the aggregation of abusive power, the people benefit. When institutions of power are allowed to conspire against the people, however, the system will collapse.
This simple yet shrewd principle has long been the lynchpin to America's historic success. Likewise, the abandonment of this mechanism in exchange for an "Expert Class" system of government that operates above the law at the behest of lobbyists and bureaucrats beholden to no one has invariably led the United States to its current inflection point and myriad crises. Just as no manipulable fiat money system has ever survived for long, no governing system dedicated to its own powers and preservation, rather than the protection of those powers possessed by the people, has ever not ultimately devolved into tyranny. After two years of COVID-1984 madness, the reckless attempts by one-world-government globalists to expand and sustain their leverage through a "Great Reset," and the coming currency collapse and food shortages they've intentionally set into motion, the fruits of that tyranny are visible all around us.
What happens next is entirely in our hands. The more Westerners understand what the Marxist globalists have wrought, the more unwilling they will be to allow those same Marxist globalists to remain in power after our current troubles pass. When that time does arrive, Americans will benefit most by returning to the principles of government that first set them free. Other Western nations wishing to prosper would do well to follow in America's footsteps. And the Big Government parasites that have long worked to precipitate our current calamities would be wise to take seriously their dwindling options: get lost, get out of the way, or get run over.
Image via Picryl.
Anybody watching what Obamacare's costs have been doing lately?
This wouldn't exactly be news to anyone who has to buy Obamacare health care insurance...
But for perspective, here's the latest on the 2010 government health care takeover that had been so vaunted in the press as Your-Government-Here-To-Help:
Tripled? We've got 7.9% inflation at last count, so this 'tripling,' even over the course of 12 years, with compounding increments, tops that.
So much for President Obama's claim that his signature health care bill would cut insurance costs and everyone would be so grateful and happy.
The archived White House website page had all the promises of rainbows and unicorns:
The Affordable Care Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in March 2010, gives middle class families better health security by putting in place comprehensive health insurance reforms that will hold insurance companies accountable, lower health care costs, guarantee more choice, and enhance the quality of care for all Americans.
Obamacare, though, was far from just Obama's baby. Its loudest cheerleader was "b-f-d" Joe Biden:
Who, since then, has continued to tout Obamacare, promising to "repair and renew it" as if such perfection could ever need such a thing, given the hype.
According to Politico, which took us back to the Democrat primaries of 2020:
Many Democrats to [Biden's] left, starting with Bernie Sanders and his “Medicare for All” proposal, called for scrapping the Affordable Care Act entirely in favor of a more sweeping government-financed single-payer health system. Biden resisted. He instead pledged to build on the existing law — a position that kept him in the center of the debate, while reminding Democratic voters of his role in passing the biggest health reform since Medicare.
Obamacare had survived the Trump administration’s attempts to repeal and replace it. Biden promised to repair and renew it. Fully realizing the promise of the sprawling legislation means addressing all three of its goals: expanding coverage, curbing costs and improving the still uneven quality of American health care.
In his first year in office Biden had some early successes getting more Americans covered — but his efforts have since stalled out.
Politico doesn't even get into the fact that the program to cut health care costs has actually delivered soaring costs.
It's bad out there, which highlights the growing failure of the program. Politico notes that various subsidies will be coming to an end just as the midterms start.
Even David Axelrod is complaining:
Axelrod? Wow.
Turns out that Obamacare, which replaced a marketplace of health care plans however imperfect (given that government interference was pretty strong even then), got replaced with a one-size-fits-all government plan of certain requirements and naturally, a monopoly for a few chosen companies that could jump through all the hoops. As entrenched monopolies, that led to the obvious thing -- a cartel that could create higher costs, or whose costs snowballed and could only pass the costs onto consumers. Obamacare was miles ahead of the current inflation now engulfing the country, piling up one hike after another over the course of 12 years well beyond inflation, and we're into 'triple.'
Naturally, the giant corporations, which are masters of scale on a one-size-fits-all program, were the big beneficiaries, as noted in the original tweet, rather than the little guy who's seen his health insurance premiums soar. Giant corporations are wokester outfits these days and all in on donating to Democrats. Funny how that works. Somehow, Democrats always manage to take care of the big guys.
Politico piously claims for Biden:
Equity, for instance, is also about cost, coverage and quality. And cost, coverage and quality are also about equity.
We don't hear much about that from Biden these days. It's not that his minions have not been busy -- but where they have, they've made things worse.
According to MedPage, a trade journal:
[Obama health care advisor Ezekiel] Emanuel's arguments would be more credible if he had identified even one ACA policy that reduced costs. But the only ACA policy he mentioned was a program that, he writes, "required reducing ... wasteful readmissions."
This would be the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP), a dangerous program that should be terminated immediately. The HRRP's proponents claimed it would cut costs and improve health by penalizing hospitals for "too many" hospital readmissions. But the evidence now indicates this program is backfiring. Well-controlled studies show the HRRP may have raised the mortality rate among heart failure and pneumonia patients by reducing necessary readmissions, and it has not cut costs.
We share Emanuel's commitment to an efficient healthcare system with evidence-based price controls. But cheerleading from academic leaders about the false achievements of futile, and sometimes harmful, cost-containment policies has unintended consequences for health and efficiency, and it undermines our ability to build a universal, affordable healthcare system. We already have reliable methods to evaluate the successes and failures of national cost-control policies. Congress and the President must base future health policies on solid evidence of benefits without patient harms. And if we have the guts to be honest, we will acknowledge that learning from failure can be the key to future success.
Biden himself, though, has done nothing except continue to defend this money-eater.
It comes on top of skyrocketing oil costs, rising home prices, out-of-control education costs, and inflation not seen since the days of Jimmy Carter. But sitting in the background, there's always the big spectacular inflationary record of health insurance premiums, led by Obamacare, which Biden has defended and entrenched as president. That's part of the failure of big government and all its false promises. And it's also the Biden record for incompetence alongside all the other failures of his administration.
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