BO Magic

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Obama's Magic

Read it all, it covers a few of the fallacies very well. I especially liked this paragraph:

Next up, Mr. Obama will re-regulate the economy, with no ill effects
whatsoever! You may have heard that for the past 40 years most
politicians believed deregulation was good for the U.S. economy. You
might have even heard that much of today's financial mess tracks to
loose money policy, or Fannie and Freddie excesses. Our magician will
show the fault was instead with our failure to clamp down on innovation
and risk-taking, and will fix this with new, all-encompassing rules.
Presto!

Where McCain has really let us down is by thinking that the populist rhetoric of "blame Wall Street / CEOs / Business" is acceptable. The reason FDR could never fix the depression is because you can't sit around and blame the folks that have to get you out of the hole you are in for all the known ills. It really matters not at all "who is responsible", what matters is "where do we go from here". Railing against "Wall Street" is just going to have all the productive parts of the society sit on the sidelines until the windbags get through yelling.

"The little guy" can't work until there is some place for him to work. You can scream all day long about how much you hate "Wall Street", but what we need is a TEAM EFFORT. We just succeeded in "benching Wall Street". Congratulations!

Confidence, Reality, Rights

Listening to MPR today I heard the economist that they tend to bring in whenever there is big financial news talk about how "the underlying US economy is sound, what we have is a financial liquidity problem caused by sub-prime mortgages". Yesterday, on NPR, I heard a discussion about the Financial Bailout in Britain of $1 TRILLION, which is something like 1/3 of their total GDP, MUCH larger than the US $700 Billion, especially compared to GDP (1/3 vs 1/13).

Here we have a more or less standard view from Thomas Frank's, author of the book "The Wrecking Crew".

Here's what I mean: You've got people in the Republican Party whose philosophy is one of cynicism towards government and one of complete disrespect towards particular branches of government. ... They've run these branches of government completely in reverse, put people in charge of them who don't believe in the mission, and done everything else to make government accountable not to the voters, but to the business community. 

This has resulted in disaster in numerous cases. Now, when you look upon the disaster, do you say this is because government doesn't work? Or do you say, this is because a philosophy of government doesn't work? The obvious conclusion to anybody watching this stuff unfold is to say government just can't do anything right -- look how badly it's botched this job. 

But the correct answer is that government obviously does work in certain circumstances, in other countries, and it's even worked here when it wants to. What they're doing right now at the Fed and the Department of Treasury is they're playing the game exactly right -- they're intervening decisively, quickly -- they're doing it exactly right. When the chips are down and when it's something conservatives care about, they can make government work.

So, if Europe is the shining star of where "government regulation works", why would England need a BIGGER percentage bailout then the US? Wouldn't that mean that the "standard story" is wrong? The issue is NOT the "free market economy" if in fact in MORE socialist oriented, more controlled economies the situation is WORSE??

I become more and more convinced that what we are seeing is a "tipping point". In the US, the MSM and the Democrats have moved completely beyond any sense of reality on a list of fronts so wide that it defies description -- Iraq/Surge, Economy/Markets, Rights/Responsibility, are all examples.

In the late '90s we were CONSTANTLY lectured that "Bill Clinton has brought us prosperity, if you keep hounding him, the market might drop". The market dropped because the "prosperity" was nothing but the Internet bubble, BUT, the MSM had a point they really didn't realize--it is DANGEROUS for a nation/world to lose all confidence in their leadership and institutions.

It appears that we may now be beyond that tipping point where people have enough confidence to allow the system to continue to operate. My personal belief is that BO and the Democrats have realized that they WANT to get back to the 30's, for them that was the BEST OF TIMES!! They see BO as a "new FDR", sort of an "inverse Reagan", but in order to get what they want, they NEED to have DISASTER, and they NEED to "blame it on Republicans / the market / business"!!!

The worst part of the slump in the '30s happened between the 32 elections and FDR taking office the following spring. Hoover had lost all confidence from the public and the congress and the government stood idly by and let all manner of institution fail. Hoover begged FDR and company to help him do something, but in a way that only Democrats can do, they realized that it was in their political best interests to let things get as bad as possible before they came in so they could look better when it improved. Sadly, it never did improve until WWII -- none of the stuff that FDR did ever worked!!

Bush has been as powerless as Hoover was since '06, and the Democrats have worked him like a puppet on everything but the Surge. Barney Frank and company kept the pedal to the metal on Feddie and Fannie, giving as many seedy loans as they possibly could. The Dems took credit for the "stimulus", but gave Bush the blame for the deficit it added to. Economic numbers ceased to make a difference--we were in a RECESSION, no matter how much growth there was. Normally, trying to claim that our economy was "broken" when it obviously wasn't (and still probably isn't except for CONFIDENCE) would seem absolutely stupid for people that live here as all the media people do, but the MSM emotional hatred for Bush / Republicans has blinded them to the effects of a complete destruction of confidence in the both the Government and Business systems.

Two things that made the 30's as bad as they were was the constant thrashing of new government programs that added uncertainty to the economy coupled with the criminalization of normal business behavior. We are deep into both of those problems at this point. If we could have acted quickly and decisively on the underlying liquidity problem with the bailout when it first came up, MAYBE it would have been enough to get a re-start, but we couldn't. We needed to play a bunch of politics first. When both the far left and the far right are in agreement -- as they were against the bailout, my rule of thumb is "watch out".

So, we have heard a bunch of braying about "CEO Pay", "golden parachutes", "billions for Wall Street, nothing for Main Street", etc. Unfortunately we have heard it from both parties and McCain and Palin have joined in to suggesting more programs and blaming "Wall Street and not Main Street". Maybe emotionally satisfying for some, but this plays right into the Democrats hands in pushing us over the cliff.

CEO pay and golden parachutes are about CONTRACTS. The BEDROCK that allows our current western civilization to live even close to the manner that we have become accustomed is the enforceability of contracts!! When the government decides that it is going to break existing contracts that people have negotiated in good faith and legality at the time they negotiated them, then NONE of our contracts are safe. Say GE is in dire straits and decides that Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM, now retired, is the best man to get them moving. Lou looks at the situation and sees that, yes indeed, the odds are very long and the work will be very hard. Does a guy that is already worth 100's of millions have to work for potentially FREE in order for him to come on board?

The most logical thing for both parties is for GE to give him a "golden parachute" of say "50 million", but stock options / etc that are POTENTIALLY worth 100's of millions if he can pull it off. If Lou takes the job, there is no doubt he wants to win, but one isn't going to give up retirement with 100's of millions to go do a very hard job that may well be impossible knowing that if it can't be saved you walk away with nothing. If GE and Lou negotiate that contract, but the government now says "no golden parachutes", how many decades will it before there is enough faith in the rule of law to allow the retention of such talent for needed activity? A very long time to NEVER is the right answer, and even worse, if that contract isn't safe, why is ANY contract?

Essentially, all the Government involvement can be lumped under that same idea. The government is able to change the rules of the game during the game, and they have now decided to do that on a daily basis. The most likely effect of that kind of uncertainty is to have more and more people sit on the sidelines waiting to see when the game is going to stabilize. Why jump in when you aren't really even sure what game you are jumping in on? Worse, things like Sarbanes Oxley and other laws now being contemplated may put you in JAIL for actions that you took that were LEGAL at the time you took them, but are LATER declared illegal!!!

There isn't such a thing as "risk free business or investment". The riskiest things tend to have the highest potential for BOTH loss and gain. Sometimes there are boundaries put on that say "that has so little chance of return, it is illegal" ... the folks that are selling that are just making money off the selling, they aren't selling a legitimate product. Society certainly CAN make those kinds of laws, but it does so at the peril of missing some excellent opportunities for innovation and growth. Today's "stupid idea" in finance like technology, may well be tomorrows "big deal". OR, as in mortgage backed securities, yesterdays great idea may well be pushed beyond some boundary and become today's debacle. AFTER THE FACT a whole bunch of things look completely obvious. I ought to have bought Microsoft Stock in '85 and sold it right before the 2K crash. OBVIOUS, but only in hindsight.

So, the markets are in free fall, and all the kings horses and all the kings men can't put confidence back in again. In my opinion, starting in the '30s we set ourselves on the road to become a nation where a whole bunch of things were "rights and entitlements" vs "responsibilities and privledges". We had a "right" to retirement without savings (FICA), free medical care for the aged (medicare), food, shelter, clothing ... and eventually, even a home of our own(CRI, Sub-prime). Only problem is that very very few things are ACTUALLY "rights". About the only "right" that can be given all the people is the "right to opportunity", which is essentially the "right to work and keep the vast majority of what you earn". That is the only fundamental right that a government can really provide, and by providing it, the magic of free enterprise produces wealth beyond compare.

Apparently, the "right to home ownership" as expressed by the Community Investment Act proved to be "one fake right too far", BUT both parties and the MSM have decided to "blame the market" rather than blame the producers of fake rights -- the government (and those that elect it and avail themselves of the fake rights, US). The reason for that is because as the critics of the American experiment had predicted long ago, the reason the government did what it did is because the politicians were elected by people that wanted a lot of fake rights. We ALL really "want them" if we don't look too deeply at the COST of those fake rights. Ultimately, that cost is the loss of our freedom, our prosperity and any security that we thought we had.

So, will people come to their senses prior to that happening, or will they go on blaming the business and markets that make all the money that has created the greatest living standard in the world, or will they realize that all the supposed "rights" that they have created are completely illusionary without the business and market activity that produces the resources needed?? I'm completely unsure at this point, and obviously, so are a whole bunch of other people. Say your prayers, and do your part to try to get people to understand that paying attention to reality is critical to the financial health of the whole world.

How Distasteful, A Whole Year Old!

CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive - McCain targets Obama’s year-old comment on Afghanistan « - Blogs from CNN.com

Rest assured, we have never and will never hear about any comments by Bush, McCain, or Palin that are over a year old--AND, if we do, the MSM will be putting the fact that the comment is "over a year old" in the HEADLINE!

We all know that anything that a Democrat may have done that was suspect is "old news", and not worth being brought up. Naturally, the inverse is true for anything they have done that might be considered marginally good.

Liberals Rethink Free Speech

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Liberals Rethink Free Speech

Good article, the only thing he is wrong on is that it is a "rethink". Yes, yes, BO and company is already trying to suppress political speech, but this isn't a new activity for the left and we certainly haven't seen anything yet if he gets elected.

Ever since the US lefty socialist/fascist/communists stole the term "liberal" from the conservative right where it belongs, people get confused. The left has ALWAYS hated unregulated POLITICAL speech, it is freedom to burn flags, scream obscenity and show pornography is the speech that they seek to protect. The only political speech they want to allow is that which agrees with them.

The collective left will ALWAYS be STRONGLY against the speech of those that believe in individual responsibility, transcendent meaning of any sort, and values that are other than fluid and relative. They have always and will always seek to stamp true freedom of thought and speech out through any means possible including the incarceration or murder of those that speak or think in ways they see as "lying", "hateful", or "divisive". They believe that we ought be one big happy collective that operates exactly as they think we ought operate!

Thinking differently from a lefty is about the most immoral thing that they can imagine!

What's The Matter With Victims?

The GOP Blames the Victim - WSJ.com

Thomas Frank's wrote the liberal screed "What's the Matter With Kansas" in which he talks about how the right created the culture war to convince average people that there were things more important than their "self interest". You know, like God, family, truth, honor, the right to life, freedom, the right to bear arms, patriotism and that kind of drivel. Franks is of course smart enough to realize that all those things are meaningless--the only thing that makes sense is for folks to vote for protectionism, unions, socialism and state control of everything. Everyone knows that is the only RATIONAL thing that can be done for the common man!

Note how cleverly Franks has risen above "the blame game" here. He certainly isn't pointing any fingers is he? That is the kind of foolish things that only Republicans do. We are all aware that the government hasn't had any role at all in our financial system since "Republicans took control" in '80. No indeed, it has been just one long "free market party" without any SEC regulations, banking regulations, Sarbanes Oxley, taxes or none of that good solid Democrat stuff. No indeed, those Republicans wiped that all out.

Yes, I guess I agree with him 100%, and I bet Martha Stewart, the Enron guys, Michael Milikin, and a whole bunch of other folks would agree. We have had nearly 30 years in the financial wild west. No wonder this happened and the government is completely blameless!

I Wish Hugh Hewitt Were Right, Financial Meltdown

Townhall.com::Blog

This is a great little job of writing, and I wish fervently it could be true, even though I believe it is not. The main place I take exception is this paragraph:

The hard left's seven year rage against George Bush has disfigured the politics of the country, but it hasn't infected the large center or demoralized the principled right. Three quarters of the country know the sort of enemy we face around the globe and sense as well the seriousness of the economic risk that faces us and which must be met and managed from maturity and a belief in growth and capitalism's essential genius. The country has never embraced class warfare, and knows that a lurch to the left now would cripple the vast engine of productivity that is the key to a steady recovery of confidence.

I think the seven years of rage HAS disfigured not only the politics, but the emotions of a large majority of Americans. The political parties and the MSM now operate with a horrid scorched earth view in which the destruction of anything is acceptable in the quest for raw political party. The fever pitch of buying votes with earmarks, entitlements, unsustainable mortgages, environmental policies that kill the economy--the list is always growing and we rush headlong to the abyss with both parties promising it all without even a hint of mechanism to deliver.

Somewhere in the 7 year rage -- maybe when everyone's prediction that Iraq had WMD became "Bush lied", maybe when a non-story about Valerie Plame became a "special prosecutor probe", maybe Katrina, or maybe just over the course of the years when less than 2 consecutive quarters of GDP slide became "recessions", an economy growing at 2+% became "bad" and a successful Surge in Iraq dropped from the news like it had never happened.

We lost our national grip on reality. To look at the sub-prime meltdown that started under Carter, accelerated under Clinton as the government pushed their Freddies and Fannies to make riskier and riskier loans, and was fanned by Democrats as late as 2005 as they voted down legislation pushed by McCain.

They now call it a "market failure",  simply deciding to make up a story that suits what the MSM wants, but that is the story that is winning! The market is being blamed for what government created over nearly 40 years!

People are "mad as hell".  It isn't clear that they have any idea what to do to fix their anger, and it appears that we will turn 100% the wrong way causing all sorts of unpredictable harm before more of the population is forced to return to reality based thinking.

Slow Joe Bag O Donuts

An Everyman on the Trail, With Perks at Home - NYTimes.com

Yes, Joe is really a pauper for a Senator. His little hovel of a 6,800 sq foot lakefront home worth something close to $3million pretty much proves that! He does knock down about $250K a year, again, peanuts for a Senator. Easy to see why he feels that taxing the snot out of anyone that makes over what he makes is "patriotic". Somehow, I bet for a guy that makes $100K it is just as "patriotic" to make those "greedy folks" that make over $100K pay through the nose. Hmm, come to think of it, I bet that kind of logic works with a lot of people independent of income! "The folks that make more money than ME ought to pay A LOT more in taxes ... of course, **I** pay TOO MUCH in taxes and ought to pay LESS!!

I think I just restated a piece of human nature!

Does Friedman Know He is in the Boat Too?

Op-Ed Columnist - Rescue the Rescue - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

I like Thomas Friedman. I've read a couple of his books. Yes, he is mostly a NYT limousine liberal, but he is smarter than the average of that genre and a decent writer. So what gives with this?

I’ve been frightened for my country only a few times in my life: In 1962, when, even as a boy of 9, I followed the tension of the Cuban missile crisis; in 1963, with the assassination of J.F.K.; on Sept. 11, 2001; and on Monday, when the House Republicans brought down the bipartisan rescue package.

Does being Democrat REALLY mean that you NEVER have to take responsibility? What is the use of giving them the majority of votes in the House if they can't get their party together and vote for something that they supposedly believe in? There have been a number of votes over the years where the Republicans have needed basically their whole caucus to get them through and the MSM and the Democrats have really enjoyed pointing across the isle and saying "you'll be sorry" in what I guess counts as "bi-partisanship" in their books.

Is there some holy writ that says that Democrats are deserving of "political cover" when they do something that might be unpopular with a bunch of voters but really needs to be done? Somehow, the whole idea of "political cover" seems rather foreign. If Tom and his Democrat buddies are convinced that the bailout is a really really good idea, why is it that the Democrat party that has a 36 seat majority in the House doesn't have the responsibility to line up behind it? They somehow  need over 1/3 of the Republicans as WELL, even though they can pass it with LESS than their whole caucus voting for it??

I tend to agree that not passing this is going to do way more damage to everyone than passing it would have, but it seems to me that the MSM and the Democrats have successfully convinced over 50% of the country (maybe even 80%) that you really can let the fat cats end of the rowboat sink without your end sinking. I think the 80% of the folks are nuts, but this IS a Democracy (yet, at least until BO and his fascist buddies get it in their clutches), so maybe we just need to see how the boat sinks? or maybe it doesn't--I'm not a Democrat, I'm fine if I'm wrong and it turns out to be a better deal for us all than I imagined. I don't need to snatch defeat from victory as in the surge in Iraq just to prove that I'm smarter than that stupid Bush.

How in the world can a supposedly smart person blame the OTHER party when your party holds a 36 seat advantage in a house that only requires a majority to pass something? I guess there is NEVER a reason to give Democrats power, because they simply will not accept RESPONSIBILITY! 

Slow Joe Bag O Donuts

An Everyman on the Trail, With Perks at Home - NYTimes.com

Yes, Joe is really a pauper for a Senator. His little hovel of a 6,800 sq foot lakefront home worth something close to $3million pretty much proves that! He does knock down about $250K a year, again, peanuts for a Senator. Easy to see why he feels that taxing the snot out of anyone that makes over what he makes is "patriotic". Somehow, I bet for a guy that makes $100K it is just as "patriotic" to make those "greedy folks" that make over $100K pay through the nose. Hmm, come to think of it, I bet that kind of logic works with a lot of people independent of income! "The folks that make more money than ME ought to pay A LOT more in taxes ... of course, **I** pay TOO MUCH in taxes and ought to pay LESS!!

Hoping For Reality to Die

Harold Meyerson - Slow Rise for a New Era - washingtonpost.com

Harold seems to think that markets and governments are equally real. How would one arrive at that conclusion? The government produces nothing, the markets and the business they represent produce everything. The government and the chattering classes all live off the production of business people whose value is ultimately expressed in the market as well as the income and taxes from which the government skims it's take. One can try a Soviet style system, but all we know says that will take our $13 Trillion economy down to something more like $3 Trillion or less where the top 1% are all in government and hold even a larger % of the now much reduced wealth than the top 1% do today.

"Free Markets" can no more die than gravity can die. The free market lived on as "black market" even in the USSR and operated quite well, though not officially. Our markets have never been close to fully "free", and they likely never will be. The government has very much enjoyed the longest period of growth in US history and the US people have very much enjoyed all the improvement in standard of living due to the lessening of government intervention which Reagan and others were able to accomplish. Did growth vanquish all problems? No, of course not, humans are still just as flawed as ever on BOTH the government and business side, but BOTH sides have grown tremendously over this period. Does the fact that something is "natural" mean that it has no problems? No again, just ask a guy that just fell from a 30 story building if gravity has "negative side effects".

Meyerson is a perfect example of what "ideologue" means. Less government = bad, more government = good ... independent of what the discussion is about. His faith in "government" is every bit as strong as any faith in "Reaganism" that republicans may have.

When God Doesn't Make Sense

The subject book by Dr James Dobson is a really good read for someone that either has or seeks a strong Biblical grounding on dealing with tragedy in the life of a believer. Very much UNlike Rabbi Kushner, Dr Dobson believes in a sovereign God that is loving, just and very caring -- just so beyond our human understanding that our attempts to pin him down or indicate what he can and can't do are beyond futile.

Dobson doesn't claim to have all the answers, he tries to illuminate what he can from the Bible and experience he has had. A quote that hit me hard after listening to well meaning people at our nieces funeral was: "I find it irritating when amateur theologians throw around simplistic platitudes, such as "God must have wanted the little flower named Bristol for his heavenly garden". He points out that we will have to wait until we are on the other side of the river until we understand God's plan, and it is foolish to make believe that we can make sense of it here.

A paragraph that I really liked:

I hope you will see that the discomfort is intensified by a misunderstanding of time. Our journey here has the illusion of permanence about it. Billions who went before us thought the same thing. Now they are gone-every one of them. In truth, we're just passing through. If we fully comprehended the brevity of life, the things that frustrate us-including most of those occasions when God doesn't make sense-wouldn't matter so much.

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

The subject book by Rabbi Harold Kushner is a well recognized book on the subject of trying to understand grief in the context of God and faith and loved by many. His son Aaron was diagnosed with progeria ("rapid aging") at 3 and they knew it was terminal at a young age. He died at age 14. Certainly, a tragic event and one that drove Rabbi Kushner to question God, faith, life, etc as it would any father.

I think the book may well be useful to many people, but I have a lot of theological and philosophical concern with it. I found the key words in the book to be:

I can worship a God who hates suffering but cannot eliminate it, more easily than I can worship a God who chooses to make children suffer and die for whatever exalted reason.

So why is it God's responsibility to be the kind of God that one can worship more easily? From the perspective of an infinite God, are those really his only options? What is it that limits his options? How we think and feel?

Rabbi Kushner has a lot of thoughts about how God can and can't be -- in my mind, there isn't much reason to believe in a God that is not SOVEREIGN. I may or may not "agree / understand / be able to explain" a whole host of things about an infinite God, but I believe the least that my lowly person can do is recognize that it is he, not me, that is sovereign.

Kushner argues that we ought not be angry at God because his god is "limited"--god really can't prevent bad things from happening, so he ought not be blamed. While I enjoyed some of his discussion of Job, I disagreed with his conclusions and felt all the way through the book that if one was to believe in a god that was as small as Rabbi Kushners, one may as well be an atheist.

BO Fascism Begins?

Obama’s Assault on the First Amendment by Andrew C. McCarthy on National Review Online

Excellent overall article. BO and minions have already begun the fascist process of intimidating free speech.

In St. Louis, local law-enforcement authorities, dominated by Democrat-party activists, were threatening libel prosecutions against Obama’s political opposition. County CircuitAttorney Bob McCulloch and City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, abetted by a local sheriff and encouraged by the Obama campaign, warned that members of the public who dared speak out against Obama during the campaign’s crucial final weeks would face criminal libel charges — if, in the judgment of these conflicted officials, such criticism of their champion was “false.”

"False"? From the POV of BO supporters, it would be IMPOSSIBLE for ANYTHNG about his worshipfulness that isn't an accolade to be anything but "false". One of the hallmarks of free speech used to be that you could yell anything you wanted about a politician without fear of state reprisal. Apparently, "free speech" in a BO state just means you are allowed to say as many nice things about him as you want--if you don't agree, be sure to shut up.

There is a troubling reportthat the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Section, top officials of which are Obama contributors, has suggested criminal prosecutions against those they anticipate will engage in voter “intimidation” or “oppression” in an election involving a black candidate. (Memo to my former DOJ colleagues: In a system that presumes innocence even after crimes have undeniably been committed, responsible prosecutors don’t assume non-suspects will commit future law violations — especially when doing so necessarily undermines the First Amendment freedoms those prosecutors solemnly swear to uphold.)

Now that sounds great. According to Democrats, Saddam Hussein saying on multiple occasions that he would destroy the US and clearly doing everything that he could to obtain WMD wasn't enough to warrant a pre-emptive attack. But one can ANTICIPATE what US citizens will engage in voter "intimidation or oppression"? Gee, I wonder what would constitute "intimidation"? Known Republicans be present at the polls maybe?

The last paragraph is a good one ... but please read it all.

Regardless of the legal landscape, however, it is the political consequences that matter. Day after day, Obama demonstrates that the “change” he represents is a severing of our body politic from the moorings that make us America. If we idly stand by while he and his thugs kill free political debate, we die too.

BO Book Author for VP Debate Moderator?

Power Line: A shocking conflict of interest

Shocking? I can't imagine being shocked by any sort of MSM conflict or bias. How in the world could they be more in the tank for BO? The only thing that "shocks" me is when they ask him any question tougher than "Is there anything you would like us to do for you Mr Obama"?

People Acting Like Government (George Will)

RealClearPolitics - Articles - A Vote Against Rashness

The financial crisis points out that the US as a country over the past 50 years or so followed a path in both government and personal finance of getting what we want today, planning to (maybe) pay for it tomorrow. Food, shelter, clothing, education, retirement, medical care and respect have moved from things that needed to be earned to "rights" that ought be "freely available".

Of course, in the real world, there is very little that is "free". Both government and private individuals have enjoyed the separation of "buying" from "paying", but in so doing they have believed that the buying part can continue without much significant needing to happen on the payment side until "later".

So we arrive at today. It appears that at least home ownership really isn't an affordable "right", it has to drop back to being a privilege. How about retirement without saving for it? How long can the Social Security Ponzi scheme continue to provide some Americans with the short term reality, while certainly providing most of us with only the long-term fantasy? How likely is it that this or one of the other "pseudo rights" that liberal thinking has foisted on us will take down those of us that have worked, saved, and paid the taxes over a long period right along with those that have just pointed the finger of blame at "big business", "CEOs", "Wall Street", or some other supposed agent of evil?