What You Cannot Have

The oddest things get me thinking about a topic seriously enough to write about it:

Listen. You listen to me. You see that city over there? That’s where I’m supposed to be. Not down here with the dogs, and the garbage, and the fucking last month’s newspapers blowing back and forth. I’ve had it with them, I’ve had it with you, I’ve had it with all this...
I want room service!!
I want the club sandwich. I want the cold Mexican beer!
I want the ten-thousand-dollar-a-night hooker!!
I want my shirts laundered…like they do…at the Imperial Hotel…in Tokyo.

[From Johnny Mnemonic]

If you haven't seen the movie, which features Keanu Reeves's best performance, I recommend it highly. It's not perfect by any means -- its premise is an evolution of capitalism that's not merely unlikely but impossible -- but it possesses the most compelling attribute a piece of fiction can possess: a cast of characters all of whom want something, and want it badly at that...and who are inherently violently opposed to one another because of the conflicts among their desires.

In such a situation, someone has to come out a loser. Maybe a lot of someones.
We find ourselves in such a situation even as you read these words.

***

Have a gander at this instructive bit of video:

It's estimated that 95% of American Negroes will vote to give Barack Hussein Obama a second term as president. We have at least one "on record" in the above.

You might have seen this before. Liberty's Torch isn't the first site to have picked it up; Jammie Wearing Fool has posted this along with two similar segments from earlier in the Obama presidency; I suggest you view all three -- and then come back here and call me a racist.

Free cell phones?
Subsidies for your mortgage payments?
Straight handouts of cash?
Yes, ladies, you can have all these things...today.
But for how much longer?

***

Don't try to kid yourselves that the above...persons are not representative of the attitudes of their race. You certainly can't kid me; I've been around too long.

Over the past five decades, American Negroes have been relentlessly propagandized to believe three things:

• That they are owed;
• That racial solidarity should be their highest commitment;
• That they can have whatever they demand, merely for demanding it.

Do they all believe it? No. But please: Someone present me with a plausible reason why mendacious hucksters such as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, and Barack Hussein Obama can command their near-unanimous support without the great majority of them believing it and intimidating the rest into toeing the racial-solidarity line.

Of course, American Negroes aren't the only folks out there practicing "solidarity." There are others:

• Journalists and their employers;
• Entertainment celebrities;
• Single mothers;
• Government employees.

Each of these demographics has largely been convinced that its fortunes are tied to the ascendancy of the Democrat Party and its leftist / redistributionist ethic. Few among them will dare to vote against the Democrats in November -- and few of those will dare to speak openly of having done so.

These "solidarities" are very helpful to Democrat election campaigns. The Left has put a great deal of effort into nurturing them and fomenting their enthusiasm for an ever-expanding State. Together with the Democrat "base" of ideologically committed welfarists and social-democrats, they come close to 50% of the electorate, which is why Republican candidates have to scramble for every vote to have a chance of prevailing.

In a nation that's grown prosperous under a regime of freedom, a gimme-coalition can have what it demands for a time. But the longer such a coalition gets its way, the closer comes the day of reckoning, when, like Johnny Mnemonic, you can scream at the horizon as loudly as you like, but the goodies will no longer flow. Those from whom they were taken -- stolen -- will have dwindled in number; the few that remain will have deemed it irrational to continue to produce them. Half a century of exponentially expanding redistribution has brought that day terrifyingly near.

You cannot have prosperity without producers. You certainly cannot have endless streams of "free stuff."

***

There was a term in currency a couple of years ago that I haven't heard in a while: moral hazard. A moral hazard is a temptation to do something morally wrong that arises out of the incentives prevalent in a given situation. For example: In a situation in which theft is not punished by law, the temptation to steal will be considerable. If you think you can get away with it, you are in the grip of a moral hazard. The problem, obviously enough, is that theft ought to be punished when detected; a polity that doesn't do so is seriously deficient.

America is under a staggering weight of moral hazards in this year of Our Lord 2012. Yes, the police still pursue (private) thieves, and the courts still try them, and those that are convicted are punished...most of the time. But I don't have the criminal law in mind at the moment.

Governments at every level now seize half the Gross Domestic Product of the nation.
They redistribute what they've seized according to the dictates of political expediency.
They subsidize their cronies and use legal and regulatory means to hobble competitors.
They offer to free millions of obligors from their freely chosen obligations.
And millions of Americans, of every walk of life, have taken them up on it.

Moral hazards such as these don't merely elicit immoral behavior; they undermine the conception of moral standards altogether. If a thing is wrong unless the government does it, then is it really wrong? Indeed, is the notion of right and wrong as objective qualities sustainable when some persons, armed with the authority of the State, are permitted to dismiss them as they see fit?

We hear a lot about how hard it is these days to raise our kids to be decent, upstanding, law-abiding adults. Do you really think it's just because of what they see on television?

You cannot have a moral society when the largest and most powerful institution in that society is free from all moral constraint.

***

One of my favorite essays from back at Eternity Road addresses a conflict about which many Americans are in the dark, though it rages continually around us all: the war on truth. I've reposted that essay immediately below this one. If you haven't read it yet, please do so before we conclude here.

With an economic day of reckoning approaching at express-train speed, those whose fortunes have relied upon the maintenance of a gimme-coalition have only one arrow left in their quivers: deceit. They must be willing to lie straight-faced. They must do so whenever unpleasant facts are offered for their comments. They must denounce anyone and everyone who dares try to call them on their mendacities, and must vilify their opponents as racists, sexists, scare-mongers, tools of the propertied classes, add your own favorite term of condemnation here.

This is the tenor of political rhetoric in our time. It isn't just our moral standards about theft and meeting one's own obligations that have been undermined. Automatic trust in the statements of politicians, their spokesmen, and the emissions of public-policy interest groups has become impossible. But then, in a regime riven by moral hazards of so many kinds, Americans have largely ceased to trust anyone's statements. These days, "What's his angle?" is the question that rises to our minds upon hearing anyone's opinion about anything.

In a nation that has fostered the sort of "solidarities" and policies we've suffered for decades now, you cannot have trust -- in anyone.

Food for thought.