Volume 8, Issue 29
What is most important is the economic system that determines the process for income and wealth distribution.
In January prior to the pandemic, 52.5% of the American adult population received their primary income via a direct check from a government entity. Approximately 19% of the population was on welfare (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families-TANF and other programs). Three and a half percent (3.5%) were collecting unemployment. Eighteen percent (18%) work for a government entity at the federal, state or local level. This includes the military and public college campus personnel. Twelve percent (12%) were on Social Security retirement benefits. This does not include Social Security Disability benefits. Theoretically, none of these citizens experienced any change in income during the shutdown.
New unemployment numbers just released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics cites a drop in unemployment from 14.5% to 11.5%. The Federal Reserve Board estimates chronic unemployment will settle in at 8.5%. This increase of 5% unemployment from January could bring the public to 57.5% receiving a direct check from the government for primary income. 60% is a warning threshold.
Government programs are necessary. Government jobs are critical to an ordered society. We need elected officials and their staff to run the country. The military, police, and county sheriffs provide safety. The essential nature and importance of all categories of government expenditure are not the point. The point is that, at a certain level of citizen dependence upon a government check, the private sector is not able to support the level of government spending. At this tipping point, the only solution is a collapse into total government control resulting in elimination of private ownership and redistribution of wealth.
Recently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), a progressive leader, called for government restructuring encompassing many policies of socialism at the least, and Marxism at the worst. Black Lives Matter have agreed with AOC in part in their call for reforms to achieve racial equality.
More money is the recurring chorus. If governments could just print money and distribute it to whomever they desired, they would have done it a long time ago. Venezuela would do it today. Why haven’t they? Because it doesn’t work. For every government economic action, there is always an equal and opposite economic reaction. This may be inflation, deflation, or a debasement of the currency. Under no economic system can you just print money forever.
The people of the United States want racial reconciliation, fairness, and universal equality. Neither socialism nor communism, under the aegis of Marxism, is the proper economic structure to reach the goal of egalitarianism.
One only has to examine the lessons of history, past and current, to acknowledge the failures of totalitarianism.
Socialism is the concept that, in the elimination of private ownership, the people own everything collectively and are left to make choices by societal demand for production and consumption. There have been examples of democratic socialism. Communism, spawned from the basic philosophical tenets of Marxism, takes all choices away from the people and decides by government edict the goals and priorities of both production and consumption.
What progressives neglect to recognize is that, in socialism and communism, the people’s choices for pursuit of happiness are restricted to the options offered by an elitist group of government managers and dictators. A person has little freedom to make individual choices of destiny for himself or herself and their families. The equal outcome is the goal, regardless of how universally bleak or demeaning the eventual standard of living becomes.
The United States was founded on the concept that not only is birth not determinative of your destiny, but government is not empowered to dictate your destiny. The history of governments up to 1776 had been that elites controlled the population, not for the good of the people, but for the perpetuation of their selfish ideology, personal inurement of economic benefits, and maintenance of power.
And so it was with the former Soviet Union, and so it is today with communist China.
There was no equality for citizens’ rights against the state in the USSR. China is cracking down on demonstrations in Hong Kong and religion throughout the country. Chinese internment camps, operated for re-indoctrination of communist thought, are estimated to incarcerate as many as 300,000 citizens.
In a Marxist society, there is no Bill of Rights. There is no freedom of speech. There is no right to bear arms. There is no freedom of religion. Every commitment, every choice, in other words, your entire destiny, depends upon an evaluation for the benefit to the state. Its entire premise is based on the belief that a few unelected elites can manage the lives of the masses for their happiness better than they can manage their destinal choices for themselves
Marxism is in and of itself a false religion. It counterfeits the process of individuals pursuing equality through the collective freedom of pursuit of happiness.
Religion must be eliminated in a totalitarian government, for it allows the people to seek a calling higher than the government itself. This is seen as competition and fatal to totalitarian control. This anti-religion is further is counterfeit thinking against the natural order of mankind. Remember, the Iron Curtain was the ultimate border control. It was necessary to keep people in, not to keep people out.
Why would anyone want to go back to that form of government? Why would anyone suggest abandoning every principle and right declared as unalienable in 1776?
In January of 2021, it is estimated that the United States government will be $30 trillion in debt, borrowed against a $20 trillion economy. One hundred fifty percent (150%) debt to GDP is beyond any matrix or chart now used by economists for projecting economic stability. If, in fact, the structural unemployment rate is 8.5%, we will be precariously close to a tipping point of societal/government economic relationship.
By necessity, government is establishing a reverse domino effect. A moratorium on tenant evictions has been set by several states. Landlords require leniency from banks to pay their notes. Banks are now lobbying the FDIC for relaxation of requirements to allow non-performing real estate assets to be held on their books for an extended period of time. The federal government then permits certain banks to operate with dead assets.
Each of these actions eliminates a traditional course of correction to economic restructuring. Normally, tenants would have been removed and replaced with others who can pay rent. Banks would have foreclosed on landlords. Properties would have been rehabilitated for more efficient economic returns. Banks would have been required to write down bad loans and therefore forced to reexamine lending policies or fail.
An economic reset and restructuring are certain. This reverse domino effect that has been established because of the pandemic crisis must be managed so that the ultimate reset is not socialism, Marxism or communism.
What is paramount is an absolute commitment to find solutions in our economic chaos through free enterprise principles. Not for the purpose of maintaining power with any group, but to maintain freedom for all groups.
Without freedom, hope is lost. Without hope, perseverance is lost. Without perseverance, free will is lost. Without free will, one’s soul is lost.
My name is Marc Nuttle and this is what I believe.
What do you believe?