Quick riff off Scott: Secession By Atrophy - Granite Grok

Quick riff off Scott: Secession By Atrophy

He is right – we are seeing patches of America that are degenerating into some kind of ThunderDome dystopia.  We do have places, especially in our urban areas, that rival any banana republic or third world nation landscape.  Victor Davis Hanson, a professor of the Classics and military history in the California university system, has been chronicling how the parts of California ignored by the elites have been degenerating into geography indistinguishable from parts of Mexico, where a lot of the illegal aliens are coming from.  Assimiliation? Not even a concept to these Johnnie-come-latelies; what’s worse, many of the American citizens there don’t have a clue as to their history and the underpinnings of what made America great – they wait only on the monthly check and hope that the roving bands leave them alone.

Democrats are like Feminists in believing that they can have it all – all it takes is a bit more money from those, as Obama has famously declared “who don’t need it”.  Really, Mr. President – you win election to be our head employee and that gives you the right to say who needs what just on your say so?  How unAmerican is that? Yet, we see from many on the Left that same message; from the rafters, they scream “America is a wealthy nation – why should the poor suffer when these few have more than they should have”?

Problem is, Democrats / Progressives have made three fundamental errors:

  • We are a nation composed of wealthy individuals – and that is a significant difference than a wealthy nation
  • They miss and are forgetting what many poor countries (with very poor citizens) have never learned – good governance allows for wealth generation while no or poor governance means misery for all.
  • True governance does not mean “freedom to commit social engineering” – elections should not be about “we get to tell you how to change your life”.

They despise and call out Private Equity capitalists who they claim kill companies by sucking the capital out of companies and screw the workers for short term gain.  Yet, they do the same, not in the capitalist world but in the Governance world.  They deliberately obfuscate the point that in terms of Governance, they are the Vultures Governors – look at all of the blue social models like Chicago, like Illinois, like California, like the California cities going belly up.  In each case, they have sucked all of the “governance capital” out of what used to be “good governance companies”and are now down to hollowed out husks.  And now blame everyone else for what they have done (as well as wanting the rest of us to bail them out).  They have violated all three of the precepts above – and we may now be seeing the beginnings of the end stages of that Blue model – and those wanting out simply just do not want to be underneath that imploding edifice.

Scott mentioned Chicago and Detroit – both blue model cities for years – spend on the social programs but not on the infrastructure.  Look at NY City and the aftermath of Sandy – reports years old told Administrations that they had to spend money to protect their infrastructure based on their location to the sea, they decided to turn their attention to other things – are telling individuals that they cannot suck down Big Gulps, eat trans-fats, smoke, give food to the poor or other social engineering efforts to “perfect us” rather then pursuing actual good governance that truly keeps their citizens safe?  Really, has the fundamental redefinition (and then expansion) of what it means “to protect” really working?  Doubt me?  Ask somebody on Staten Island right about now.

Given the debt and how Big (and Bigger) Government is actually handling their duties, and the collectivist political environment created by the current Administration, is it any wonder that there are petitions from all 50 states at the White House website?  Sure, some may well be political stunts and stagecraft, meant to embarrass the Administration to one degree or another, but some really do see a larger problem.  The Huffington Post’s poll on this brings up an important point:

Residents of all 50 states have filed online petitions to secede from the United States, as part of the White House website’s “We the People” program. But a HuffPost/YouGov poll, released Friday, found that most Americans don’t embrace their own state severing ties with the nation. Over half opposed seeing their state secede, with 42 percent strongly opposing the idea, while 22 percent said they supported the idea. A quarter weren’t sure.

 Republicans were more likely to support the proposition: 43 percent said they were in favor of the idea, compared to 22 percent of Independents and just 10 percent of Democrats.

I’m not surprised at the low number of Democrats pooh-pooing the idea – but I am surprised that it isn’t lower.  I’m also not surprised at the much higher number of Republicans supporting such a notion – when they see that the principles of the founding fathers being trampled all over at a national level, they want to do what the Founding Fathers did – establish a new form of governance (or in this case, I believe, return to it).  Those on the Right, semi-seriously at times, will remark “hey, if the Progressives want to be one big group – but WHY won’t they just leave us alone?   Why do they want to ENFORCE that collectivism on those of us that don’t want it?”  So just from the aspect of rubbing raw those of us who don’t have the psychological neediness to always be in a clump, secession is a shiny object that says “hey, this could make them stop…or free us from them”.

What Scott speaks of, derelict areas, is a direct result of elected officials no longer understanding what good governance is and providing it (having traded and supplanted it with the obtaining and use of power instead).  By concentrating on the rainbow baubles that low intelligence voters (not speaking of IQs, but of knowledge of how American civics should work and be checked/balanced) sparkle over, elected officials in those areas continue the disservice that continues the downward spiral.  The fact that the secession movement / petitions have quickly shown up should be seen as a large dissatisfaction with the lack of good governance and the overbearing cloyness of “social engineering masquerading as governance”.  People do not want “no government”, they want a limited government that is effective and treads lightly on the rest of Society.

Unfortunately, I share the dim view that Scott intimates – that until the electorate demands AND elects elected employees (let’s start calling them what they are, shall we, because with leadership like this…..) that unwinds the monstrosities that have been created, the Law Of No More Money will hold sway.

 

Sadly, while the Republican session, led by Bill O’Brien, refused the money and lowered the spending, it seems common wisdom that NH, now Democrat led by

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