Posted by
KsReaganite on Tuesday, November 18, 2008 8:19:55 PM
Not a red penny, not a nickel, not a dime for Detroit. Enough of the fear mongering about how if the Big Three collapse, the ripple effects will eventually engulf us all. That red herring has time and again allowed overcompensated executives and overpaid union bosses to live in a fantasy world where they are insulated from the laws of economic consequences. In times when many Americans struggle to find jobs that pay a decent living wage, and their health insurance premiums and co-pays keep heading towards the stratosphere, it is unconscionable for the UAW goons to claim a birthright to subsidized forty dollar an hour jobs and blue ribbon healthcare plans that have no co-pays. It makes even less sense when this entitlement mentality is virulently promoted in an industry where conscientious, visionary, and smarter competitors are thriving and paying into the national economy rather than asking for a handout.
In a broader sense, the calls for Detroit bailout are entirely in character with the mindset that lazy, indulgent, pampered people should be protected from the consequences of their decisions because otherwise the hard working people who sacrificed and made smarter choices will win. We do it with the public schools everyday when we succumb to the nonsense of how testing is bad, homework is burdensome, and year long school is only for those nerdy Asians. We do it in colleges when we insist that taxpayers underwrite students who live a cushy life with newest cars, the latest gadgets, and biggest beer bongs while taking six years to graduate with degrees in ethnic studies and comparative 14th century Latin literature. And we do it in government where the most useless, arrogant, unnecessary petty bureaucrats keep taking in huge salaries and platinum plated benefits because we are too chicken to point out that every bureaucrat is not necessarily a selfless public servant who gave up a lucrative private sector job. And thanks to the election bargains stuck by the incoming liberals, a new wave of useless publicly funded ‘volunteers’ are going to be subsidized by honest taxpayers.
The end of a republic draws nigh when a majority of the people figure out ways to vote themselves money out of the public treasury, so opined a New York banker some time ago. His name was Alexander Hamilton and he was speaking at the inauguration of United States Department of the Treasury where he was to become the architect of the Republic’s financial system. Well may we pay heed to Mr. Hamilton's observation or else we would have taken another step on the path that the erstwhile Roman Republic took..into luxurious nothingness.