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Originally Posted by August
No, I haven't forgotten how the young think Lcpl (at least not yet), but I do know that the young rarely have any idea of how THEY will think when they get older.
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Well, I can certainly agree with that. I usually don't have any idea what I'll be thinking six months from now. Even at 28 years, I still have so much to learn.
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Now I know that the young tend not to trust their elders but please trust me in these two things:
1. Our fine country isn't worth destroying because our government regulates fast food content, bans smoking in public places, enacts socialized health care, or any number of other things the Feds have done in the past 150 years.
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But the actions they have taken will destroy it, anyways. It's always one little thing at a time; "protect my job from this", "don't let them do that", "somebody should do something about this" "I'm voting for the guy who.....whatever". They're all just straws on the camel's back. Sooner or later they will break the free-market economy, and when that happens, we are all screwed. Giving the government the power to make such decisions only accelerates the process.
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2. If there is another civil war, and the Federals lose, our country will indeed be destroyed. It will fragment and the pieces will be at war with each other within a generation.
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I'll take your word for it, but that doesn't mean it isn't going to happen. I would much prefer that the Union remain intact, and that there be some peaceful reform of government, but let's be honest, how often does
that happen? I think it's a legitimate concern.
As for the pieces of the union going to war with one another within a generation, I think you could be right about that. People always find a reason to go to war, and America would not likely become an exception. However, this is also not the Civil War of 1865. I'm not talking about a bunch of Southerners trying to establish a seperate nation, I'm talking about a nationwide revolution with the intent of overthrowing the whole of government. It'd be nasty as hell and the country would suffer greatly for it, but at some point people are going to get fed up enough with this nickel-and-dime socialism that they will use force to repeal it.
Our government has put us on a highly unsustainable path that can lead only to economic collapse or war, and probably both. When things become scarce, people start fighting. We've managed to pawn off the conflict to other nations in the past, but that is not a sustainable system, either. Wars are very expensive and create longstanding and costly commitments. Moreover, people in the Western world are quite sick of them. Unless we get India or Pakistan or China or someone to go to war with somebody, we're not going to have the economic steroids we've had in the past.
I may not be as experienced as you, but I have learned a few things in my short existence, one of which is that you do not mess with mutually beneficial transactions. Trade powers everything we have, and when you halt it, you are doing immeasurable harm. Did you ever stop to think about what effect your ban would have on the millions of people in the salt-mining, salt-processing, and food industries? It would literally kill a lot of them, and for no reason at all since you can already purchase salt-free foods in great quantity. Come to think of it, it might also literally kill some of the employees in third-world nations. The free market also kills industries every day, but it doesn't go out and wipe a gigantic section of aggregate demand in one fell swoop.
It is ideas like yours that will destroy the free market system, through re-appropriation of wealth or negligence of potential consequences. One simply cannot tell billions of consumers and workers what they may and may not do in a system that relies on the efforts and choices of billions of consumers and workers. Not possible. Nobody on the planet is that intelligent. Put a million brains together, and they won't even come close to devising a system that is good for everyone. Order without design will often far outstrip the plans that men consciously contrive. Some guy said that, but I can't remember who it was.
Proper government has exactly three roles. It must punish fraud, coercion, and use of force. If you give it power to do much else, it will turn on you. That is the natural progress of things. It should never be an agency for anyone to advance an agenda, whatever it might be. If you can try to use it for your own ends, a bigger fish is going to use it more effectively for his.