How we deal with national problems need not, in all cases, be nationally. A large fraction of our national weakness has resulted from the least-efficient mechanism in the country – and the most expensive – the federal Government in its thousands of permutations, assuming responsibility for local and intensely personal problems and discomforts. These would include things like food, education, employment, housing, and sexuality… not to mention the nature of household appliances and pronouns. We are becoming weaker as a people and weaker individually, as we wait for unrelated bureaucrats and disingenuous politicians to make us comfortable. Only in the past 30 years, or so, have we begun to recognize that every bit of comfort has come at a loss of freedom. Let’s move forward.
IMMIGRATION
Every nation must deal with immigration. It’s an outgrowth of the “greener-grass” syndrome. People in many countries live in economic and political systems that are pretty crappy. Often there isn’t enough food or the government is mean to people. Many of those countries are led by dictators or communists of various shades of red, leaving the residents not very happy. Eventually some of those people do what it takes to move to some other country where the political and economic “grass” is greener… or prettier… or less crowded. All countries, including those that people leave, have laws – or fences – to control entry, which means not crossing their border until or unless the new country actually thinks it might be good to let the foreigner across that border. Every country does this: controls and guards its border, mainly because one never knows when a foreigner might try to steal from the new country or from its people or, worse, try to do harm to the new country or to its people.
So, every country on Earth controls its borders, umm… except for one: Ours, the U. S. of A. Interestingly, ours is one of the freest and the most blessed with food and blessed with the idiocy of perpetual welfare. How would a relatively modern, successful country like ours, ever select a leader who would not defend its borders? It is a conundrum. Our current leader, chosen according to legend by 80 Million of his fellow citizens, has actively subverted the laws – and the fences – of his country resulting in the unbridled entry of more than 5 Million strangers from 100 other countries (or more), a million of whom sidestepped the polite greetings of the so-called “Border patrol” staff so that they could enter in secret, perhaps with less than honorable intentions toward their new country. What an odd “leader” our country is entrusted to.
Let us hope every voter with the opportunity is able to choose a far, far different leader so that our country’s border will again be protected and guarded. It’s a simple thing.
DRUGS
Drugs can heal or injure or kill. These 3 options are true for both licit and illicit drugs. In concert with the problems of immigration, tons of illicit drugs cross the unguarded border we just discussed, and they definitely injure and kill the legal residents of this country. Our erstwhile government, hired to protect us, the citizens, has failed to solve the problem of mind-altering and often deadly drugs for, well, virtually forever. But, under current leadership and the inactions of our bureaucratic “deep state,” the swath of death such drugs have wrought has reached new depths of death and failure. One wonders why this particular national problem has proven insoluble. Our national government reflexively tries to force the solution to deadly, destructive drugs back upon individuals and localities, while grasping onto personal problems that earn votes and the continuation in power to make them national ones. Someone is not being honest with the citizenry.
Over the span of 9 years or more, America sacrificed about 55,000 of its young men and women fighting Communists in Viet-Nam. We have agonized over the waste of those young people for the 50-plus years since we pulled out. Lots of lies and untruths were told to the American people during that botched conflict, yet we persevered until there was nothing left to fight for, and we left.
Drugs kill between 60,000 and 100,000 young people EVERY DAMNED YEAR nowadays – mostly due to fentanyl that comes through Mexico, our “friends” to the south. The victims don’t need the Defense Department to ship them overseas to be killed; overdosing can be accomplished close to home… sometimes in the home.
Fentanyl is fairly easy to make from its constituent chemicals, benzylfentanyl and 4-anilinopiperidine and our other “friends,” Communist China sells large quantities of those chemicals to Mexican cartels. Toluene, an easy chemical to obtain, they don’t need to import. “Fentanyl” is 100 times as potent as morphine in its ability to react with pleasure receptors in the brain, so a user must be very, very careful as to dosage. Its other effect is suppression of breathing, and a user certainly wouldn’t want to end up like George Floyd, late of Minneapolis. A deadly dose, even for a man as big as the late Mr. Floyd, is about the volume of one shake of salt on some food – very, very careful. Unfortunately, most users of drugs, particularly drugs of questionable origin, are somewhat stupid. Tens of thousands smarten up every year, right before they stop breathing.
A president, especially one elected due to his immense popularity with some 80 Million of his fellow citizens, would go out of his way, at least a little bit, to guarantee that they or their offspring would be safe from the ravages of illicit drugs like fentanyl. It’s the least he could do for the millions of people who loved him so much, once. It turns out that that President is more enamored of the one-point-something Billion friends he has in China, dwarfing the paltry crowd who “voted” him in. So, he has done less than nothing to stop the flow of illegal drugs or illegal aliens across our once-guarded border. Indeed, his actions have facilitated both of those illegal border-crossings, and here we are. Parents and lovers who are mourning the loss of loved-ones to fentanyl and other “southern” drugs, are advised to never forget who their President cares about least.
Drugs could be stopped, but not one plea-bargained case at a time. (See: https://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2016/05/15/drugs-and-governance/)
It would be refreshing to hear a campaign speech that included the protection of the American people as a key promise. It would elicit many Prudent votes, particularly if the death penalty were revived for drug distributors.
MEDICINE & FREEDOM
Recently, as in 3 years ago, a “new” coronavirus swept across the planet. A lot of people died as a result, but not always from that virus, COVID-19. We’ve talked about this, but the virus is not the biggest damage-causer. The presence of COVID yielded a massive loss of rights and freedoms – un-Constitutionally – and changed the relationships among individuals, health-care providers and institutions, and changed the relationship between the federal government and individuals. We who are plagued with short memories, owe it to ourselves and to our descendants, to keep alive the abuses Americans have been subjected to and why the new relationships must be reversed in law. Lately we have heard the CDC and the NIAID branch of it, try to walk back the directives they issued during the “pandemic” that cost many their jobs, licenses and even lives. Governors, school systems, public agencies, even branches of the military created executive authorities and powers to direct the actions of individuals because they were “following CDC guidance” or “following the science” as imaginatively defined by people like Dr. Anthony Fauci who claimed to “represent” science. People like to think that “doctors,” including Phd’s, are “scientists,” but many are followers of others. For medical doctors, with the brutal intrusion of federal governance into health care, many are employees, now, and they can be fired by the institutions that they turned to for stability and protection, if they don’t kow and tow.
Police and fire departments forced trained members to accept the experimental injections or lose their jobs; military branches forced members to accept the shots or lose their position, despite the investment in training and skills. Teachers were forced to accept the experimental chemical injections on the same basis. People were forced to get the injections or forego normal exercise of their rights of movement, assembly or commerce. Almost none of what was imposed on us, free, sovereign, Americans, was Constitutional. Those who were questioned on these actions used various claims of ignorance by citing the “CDC” advisories as their authority to restrict freedoms. Ostensibly, thanks to active fear-mongering by government entities, that same CDC and NIAID (Fauci) and ignorant media (to the point of marshalling hatred against those who disagreed with the fear… mixing it all up with “racism,” lack of “equity” and even “white supremacy” as reasons that people questioned “the science”) COVID was such a threat that states of emergency were justified and people could be arrested or economically destroyed for opening their businesses.
To be Prudent, most of “science” touted during the dark medical age of 2020 through 2022, was bogus. Real science was often put forth and literally suppressed by government and media working together to protect a single narrative, and those actions killed tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Americans who would have survived COVID relatively easily had less harmful treatments been allowed early in their infections. In some cases, those alternative treatments worked in very late stages of infection, but it took a contentious legal battle to obtain them. Hundreds of thousands.
Science is not a place or even a consensus, it is a process. Stopping investigation, data analysis and experimentation by claiming “settled science” or similar baloney, is as anti-science as can be. That’s what the “great” Anthony Fauci represented throughout. The entire National Institutes of Health – NIH – should be disassembled and reconstituted in a way that will improve health and longevity, not the bottom lines of pharmaceutical companies.
The only legitimate role of government in our democratic Republic is to be a partner in the health, safety, advancement and prosperity of its citizens. Consider what it is, in fact today, and recognize why Prudence indicates that these should be revolutionary times.
DOLLARS
The world is awash in dollars including the trillions we create through productive enterprise in our own economy, those we create through productive enterprise in other countries, the “air-dollars” the FED creates for us at re-election times, and the dollars created by foreign banks and enterprises. Lots and lots of dollars. The “air-dollars” have been tolerated by Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations (OPEC being largely a creation of Henry Kissinger and the American oil industry) and nearly every other nation in the world since Nixon closed the “Gold Window” of the Treasury in 1973. Simultaneously we guaranteed to protect Saudi Arabia and its oil markets and they agreed to market oil only in dollar denominations. People who wanted oil, and many other traded products, were happy to accept dollars in payment and just as often would sell their goods in terms of dollar values rather than their own currencies. The need to maintain “exchange rates” with all other currencies and the dollar, gave rise to incredibly lucrative currency speculations that have been not only a financial lever but a political one, as George Soros and others can testify. So many dollars. Every one is a bill – a bill against American productivity, and each must eventually be paid with something valued by the holder.
Many in power today seem to view the ocean of dollars as something that will be tolerated forever, and, further, that our incomprehensible debt – over 32 Trillion, now – can be “mentalized” as opposed to monetized. That is, we will eventually be able to talk our debtors out of worrying about it or even wanting it paid back. Without grasping what their attitude means, many people just roll their eyes when asked about how we will ever deal with our national debt? Since it can’t be dealt with now, the best thing is to not let it worry us too awfully much, and let someone worry about it in the future. Apparently, since we have made ours the largest single element of worldwide debt, all other nations should realize that if our debts are called the world will be worse off without an independent United States… so there: deal with it. That’s some convenient mentalizing, but it’s not likely to work.
Until 10 or 15 years ago, the majority of nations accepted the dominance of the dollar as a trade-off for stability and extensive military aid from the U.S. to the more than 150 nations in which Americans were posted to protect or stabilize smaller countries facing politically crappy enemies. Militarily, the U.S. had established a global empire that benefitted itself in both trade and influence, yet also cost it more than its own productivity could afford, hence the enormous debt being tolerated. But tolerance isn’t love. There was and is nothing about our past relationships that will inhibit smaller countries from accepting “help” from Communist China, our sworn enemy. Part of China’s all-dimensional war against the U.S. is the unseating of the dollar as the global currency of trade. If we lose the “petro-dollar” advantage other nations will quickly decide to not accept payments of international trade obligations in dollars. One hopes that some one of the geniuses who brought us to this point of astronomical debt, is working on how the U.S. of A. is going to survive as an independent entity without the petro-dollar economy to sustain it. Voters should ask politicians this question.
Fellow Prudentialists will appreciate the growing, unique responsibilities of U.S. citizenship, ignored or un-taught only at our peril. Let’s move further.