THE GLOBAL THREAT OF OUR TIME

"Peace with justice means refusing to condemn our children to a harsher, less hospitable planet.  The effort to slow climate change requires bold action… With a global middle class consuming more energy every day, this must now be an effort of all nations, not just some.  For the grim alternative affects all nations — more severe storms, more famine and floods, new waves of refugees, coastlines that vanish, oceans that rise.  This is the future we must avert.  This is the global threat of our time.  And for the sake of future generations, our generation must move toward a global compact to confront a changing climate before it is too late.  That is our job.  That is our task.  We have to get to work." 

–President Zero, Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, Germany, June 19, 2013

There is a great deal of sniggering about Zero’s pathetic Brandenburg Gate speech yesterday (6/19).  The headline in the British London Telegraph summed it up: "Barack Obama Bombs in Berlin – A Weak, Underwhelming Address from a Floundering President."

Or, as the New York Post more pithily and succinctly described it:  "Mush from the Wimp."

Chrissie Tingle-leg Matthews blamed it on the sun shining on the TOTUS.

The above quote from the speech does, however, serve a vital purpose:  it focuses our attention on "the global threat of our time."

For in the opposite of its intended meaning, Zero is right:  the threat of "climate change" is at least the proximate gravest danger the world faces right now.  That is to say, it is the latest and largest rationale of the Left for the seizure of control over our lives.

And he’s taking specific actions to do so, which we could call his War on Energy.  E.g., the New York Times reported yesterday (6/19) he will be putting screws to the nation’s electricity producers; last week (6/12), Bloomberg reported his using an obscure rule on microwave ovens to raise the price of most anything that uses electricity.

Notice above, however, that the scam of Warmism – the clinically deranged claim that storms, floods, famines and rising oceans are our fault – is the proximate danger.  It is but a device, an excuse.  The at-root fundamental "global threat of our time" is this:

Government greed. 

The pathological desire for more money and more power by governments.  And not just in America but all over the world.  Jack Kelly put the problem into one single word: the government answer and demand regarding any problem or situation is… more.  Always and nothing else but more, more money stolen from you, more rules and regulations to diminish your freedom.  Always with no exceptions.

This is not just Zero, nor America.  It’s worldwide.  Richard Rahn can explain all day long how much overwhelming evidence there is that the recipe for prosperity is smaller, not larger government – but the fact is that the number of governments who use that recipe for creating prosperity instead of expanding their own power is miniscule.

How do people stand for it?  How do people tolerate the bottomless corruption, rapacious thievery called taxation, bureaucrats controlling every aspect of their lives, and government goons sticking guns in their face whenever they want?  (There were some 70,000 "No-Knock" SWAT-team raids in the US last year.)

Sometimes people rise up in inchoate anger and frustration.  There are anti-government protests taking place in 80 cities in Brazil today (6/20). Anti-government protests in Turkey are escalating, despite the vicious efforts of the Erdogan regime to suppress them.  Almost always, such uprisings have one of two results:  1) they sputter out, with people giving up or being forced to, or 2) they replace the rulers with ones just as bad or (more likely) far worse.

For an example of #1, see Putin’s Russia.  For #2, see the Arab Spring.

So Government Greed continues to dominate the world, continues to be the ever-growing global threat of our time.  But why?  What allows this?  And is there a solution that could put an end to it?

The answers must lie in realizing that this is a psychological problem, that the answers lie not in attempts to restructure governments and political systems, but in identifying the perceptions and beliefs in people’s minds that allow Government Greed to exist.

So, what’s the problem, what’s the pernicious set of beliefs and distorted perception of reality?

Anti-capitalism.

The problem is not the two-digit IQs who engage in antics like the Carnival Against Capitalism in London last week (6/11), with signs saying "No Borders No Banks No Capitalism."  It’s not the idiots on the fringe – and it’s not professors preaching Marxism to innocent young minds either.

Anyone who thinks for themselves can easily see through professorial claptrap.  My profs at UCLA in the early 60s were no less hyper-leftie than those of today.  All you had to do was to ask them about Marx’s Labor Theory of Value, "Have you ever tried to sell yesterday’s newspaper?"

Back then, there was a full page color cartoon in Playboy magazine that I taped up in my Sigma Nu fraternity room, right next to the Playmate of the Month.  At a traffic light in Manhattan, two cars are stopped.  One is a VW Bug driven by an old professorial type smoking a pipe.  The other is a Caddy limo with a liveried chauffeur, and a young man in the back wearing a loud plaid coat – who is leaning out the window calling out to the man in the Bug:  "Professor Wilson!  Remember me?  Bobby Jenkins – you flunked me in Econ 101!"

That was 50 years ago.  At that time, I hadn’t read Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman, nor The Anti-Capitalist Mentality by Ludwig von Mises, much less his monumental Human Action.  I’d never even heard of Ayn Rand, whose Atlas Shrugged, written in the 1950s, so accurately describes the politically debauched America of today.

Reading these treatises made me much more knowledgeable about just why capitalism works and why anti-capitalism doesn’t – but plain common sense, possessed by most anyone, can grasp that in basic principle.

The problem of anti-capitalism is not intellectual, it is not due to mis-education, it is visceral.  Talk to most any Democrat, any Libtard, any leftie Brit or Euroweenie, and you’ll learn that their hatred of capitalism is in their gut, not in their head.  All that’s in their head is a collection of memorized slogans.

Yet… yet… the really big question is: Do people want to be free?  You and I are tempted to instantly respond, Why of course they do!  But for many, freedom is scary.  It can be frightening to be fully adult, fully personally responsible for yourself, much less for your whole family. It’s so easy to want someone like your mommy and daddy who took care of you when you were young.  Someone who’s kind enough to offer you to do so if you’ll only vote for them so they can keep the subsidy or welfare flowing.

Then the question becomes: How do we get people to be excited about being free, to be confident enough to want to be responsible for their lives? 

Now we’re getting down to the nub.  People are anti-capitalist in their gut because in their gut they feel impotent.  The life purpose of despot schmucks like Zero and other Dems is to make people feel impotent.  Then it’s duck soup to make such people dependent upon you, so their votes will keep you in power. 

And now you have a vicious circle of government vampires sucking the blood out of people making them feel impotent, then making them dependent, which makes them feel more impotent, which makes them more dependent, down and down until they’re in a black hole of certainty that they cannot fend for themselves if they were free.

This is the Global Threat of Our Time, and it is scumbags like Zero who are perpetuating it. 

How do we, then, reverse the circle, turn it into an virtuous circle of ever-increasing independence and confidence in being free?

The question will not be answered here.  It is asked to engender suggestions of ways to do so on the TTP Forum.  For there is no silver bullet – there must be a plethora of ways to create a virtuous circle of freedom, to make capitalism and freedom cool, to make it uncool and creepy to have your blood sucked out of you by government vampires.

We can help get our fellow Americans, and our fellow human beings wherever they are, out of the Black Hole of Anti-Capitalism and Government Dependency.  What are your ideas about how we can?