Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

I have absolutely no doubt that "my" government and the main stream media are lying to me about the state of the economy, the real causes of the "credit crisis", the effects of government interventions in the economy, and the real objectives of those who are exploiting the current crisis to gain political power. I believe that the intention in fomenting public hysteria and social unrest is to advance agendas that would be unthinkable without the camouflage of an artificially created crisis.

I see disturbing parallels between the grossly dishonest political manipulations of today and the fall of the Wiemar republic. This is of course a proscribed politically incorrect observation. Great efforts have been made by those who desire to repeat the mistakes of the past to artificially prohibit the public discussion of the lessons of the past.

Wiemar faced competing authoritarian factions seeking to leverage the superficial emotional attractions of socialism to gain political power. The Fascists and Communists cooperated in their shared objective of defining the political perspective between them, with the Fascists becoming the "right wing" while the Communists became the "left wing" - thereby eliminating moderates and pro-freedom perspectives from the public consciousness. The perceived alternatives could then be limited to a choice of evils - choosing between variations of authoritarian socialism. Both the Fascists and Communists engaged in social and political violence aimed at destabilizing rational society, and secondarily directed at each other in their competition to seize control.

The Wiemar republic attempted to preempt the attractions of the populists on the "right" and "left" by instituting socialist policies of its own. However, while the Fascists and Communists had the luxury of being able to promise anything the unthinking masses wanted to hear without having to actually deliver on their empty promises, Wiemar was limited by the hard realities of trying to actually deliver on their promises in the real world. The effects of their socialist policies on the real economy were disastrous.

The unthinking masses failed to recognize the true cause of the economic disaster, and continued to believe the false promises of the Fascists and Communists that they could "fix" all the problems if allowed to exercise absolute power. As a result, the public abandoned even the partial individual freedoms of the Wiemar Republic in trade for the empty promises of security and unearned wealth offered by the authoritarians.

In America today, the dominant parties pretend to be opposite poles of the political spectrum while in reality they are just variations on the theme of authoritarianism. The major parties are engaged in a conspiracy of convenience to suppress the rational alternative - a free society based on the principles of individual freedom, the kind of free society America has been in the past, and which has been the core source of our current prosperity.

There can be little rational doubt that government today has far more in common with an organized crime syndicate than the kind of limited representative republic defined in our Constitution. The recent tactics employed by the Obama administration to coerce secured creditors to "willingly" surrender their contractual rights in the Chrysler bankruptcy to the politically powerful labor union, under threat of persecution by the government agents and the mass media propaganda machine, reeks of Chicago style gangsterism.

On another level, government "accounting practices" are an ongoing crime in process. The government routinely practices gross violations of accounting standards that it would aggressively prosecute if used by a private citizen. The primary reason for the appalling state of government accounting is the need to lie to the citizens - to conceal from the citizenry, through obfuscation, obstruction, and contrived complexity, information that government doesn't want the citizens to know about its actual activities and costs.

And yet, the relentless propaganda claims that the same government that refuses to clean up its own ongoing internal financial crimes is somehow qualified to regulate and control our free market economy. We're endlessly told that only government can save us from the politically motivated financial crisis that government manipulation of the economy created in the first place.

The standard reaction of government apologists to these uncomfortable truths is to endlessly deny that they can be proved to their satisfaction. Any evidence provided is "answered" with more government manufactured lies intended to distract attention away from the initial point, and to force critics into wasting ever more of their otherwise productive efforts endlessly pointing out the fallacies in layer after layer of government lies.

If I engaged in the kinds of deceptive practices that have become standard practice in government, I could be rightly prosecuted for fraud. Why is it any different when government - in the person of its agents and apologists - openly lies to me with the intention of deceptively taking by force ever more of my money to use for purposes that I find objectionable?

These liars also commonly seek to prohibit any meaningful discussion of their lies by wrapping them in emotionally manipulative claims. For example, anyone attempting to address the actual economic impacts of today's abusive tax rates is immediately accused of wanting to starve children and throw old people out on the street. The issue quickly degenerates into emotion loaded accusations of the "inhumanity" and "lack of compassion", making it impossible to have a rational discussion of the real economic damage caused by excessive taxation, and the pervasive corruption and social distortions caused by income redistribution schemes.

The worst aspect of the current "crisis" is the extent to which it is falsely claimed to have been caused by fundamental flaws in the principles of free market capitalism. This overt lie is being actively used to justify ever more authoritarian abuses of the economy in the name of compassion, economic justice, saving failed mega-companies that are claimed to be too big to be allowed to fail, etc. The perceptions of the general population have become inverted with the solution being falsely demonized as the cause, and vast new expansions of the real cause being promoted as the necessary solution.

The public's willingness - even eagerness - to believe the lies is a direct result of the general decline in the meaningful understanding of how our free enterprise socioeconomic system functions. Earned success has been demonized by those who have exploited the corruption of America's limited republic into a populist democracy, in order to establish for themselves a parasitic pseudo-success. The individualism on which our nation was founded, and which has been the source of our unparalleled prosperity, has been largely displaced by aggressive victim-hood venally promoted by unions, feminists, black racists, and socialist politicians.

To the post FDR generations, raised on a constant stream of lies about FDR's socialist "rescue" of America from the evil capitalists, that civil rights legislation was necessary to impose "social and economic justice" on an otherwise gratuitously abusive society, and other Anti-American statist deceptions, the very concept of individual earned success has become an alien concept. The products of government schools have been indoctrinated with the fallacy that all legitimate economic prosperity is created and distributed by the state. The free market is commonly claimed to be a self-destructive evil that only aggressive government regulation and control can transform into a productive resource that can be harnessed and hobbled to serve the public interests.

The ignorant masses are relentlessly told that the only legitimate means of success is through the artificial intervention of statist authority in the form of affirmative action, racial and gender quotas, nationalization of large corporations, etc. Anyone who dares to create their own success must by definition have done so by stealing that success from a more deserving oppressed population sector.

Denied any meaningful understanding of how free enterprise really functions, and relentlessly exposed to the manipulative propaganda of the mass media, the majority of the population today may have a vague residual idea that they should want to be successful, but no idea how to achieve it other than through the arbitrary intervention of an external entity. They also lack the motivation that free enterprise is so effective in creating. So the favored "path to success" today has degraded into fabricating justifications to deny the success of motivated individuals, while demanding to be provided with "success" by the state, labor union extortion, discrimination lawsuit, or other artificial reward for failure.

The free market economy is in essence a self-regulated system with far too many variables for any simplistic regulatory scheme to factor. It only appears to be chaotic because the complexity of its dynamic interactions exceed our limited ability to understand them. This is why government measures that attempt to influence the behavior of the economy tend to cause substantial unintended consequences - and all too often cause far greater harm than the problem they were intended to solve. All too often the alleged problem isn't really a problem but rather a legitimate constraint imposed by a free market that properly obstructs the desired abuses of politically powerful special interests.

All government efforts to manipulate the free market in ways it wouldn't act on its own, will fail to achieve their claimed objectives, while succeeding only in creating unintended harm. Layering additional government manipulations on top of previous failures just compounds the distortions and failures of the regulatory scheme. The greater the layers of regulation, the more distorted the marketplace and the more (apparently) irrational it becomes.

The only effective regulation of the free market that has ever been capable of coping with the vast number of variables has been the enlightened self-interest of the participants. Government attempts to regulate the economy tend to preempt, displace, or even directly attack this core self-regulatory function, seeking to replace this most effective self-regulatory function with superficial intrusions that are more easily exploited by those wanting to abuse the economy rather than legitimately participate in a truly free market on their own merits.

Only the economy can fix itself. Additional efforts to use government to "fix" or "solve" the problems caused by previous ineffective or even outright criminal attempts to manipulate the market through government regulations, will only cause ever greater perceived problems and demands for additional layers of government controls on the economy - which will in turn create ever greater unintended consequences in the increasingly crippled economy.

The solution is to undo the damage that incompetent government interventions and manipulations have already caused, not to compound the harm by committing even more politically motivated crimes against the most effective mechanism for improving the human condition that mankind has ever found.

Unfortunately, solving the economic crisis isn't the real objective of those who have seized control of our once free economy. The economic crisis was created as a tool for terrorizing the unthinking masses into surrendering their individual liberty. The crisis will continue as long has it is politically useful - after which history shows it will be too late for our once prosperous free market economy, or our once free republic, to recover.