National Suicide

Alan Silverman asks why Mr Obama getting a second term is tantamount to national suicide.

By good fortune, I happen to have written a short essay answering that exact question earlier this fortnight:
http://www.scifiwright.com/2012/09/what-is-this-election-about/

Now, keep in mind, that I could not in good conscience cast a ballot for Mr Obama even if I were convinced that his opponent would be the death of the Republic rather than he, for reasons I list here http://www.scifiwright.com/2012/09/for-the-undecided-catholic-voter/

But in this case, we need not reach the question of what the loyal partisan of conservatism thinks might be the wiser choice of political policy, nor reach the question of what the faithful Christian is and is not allowed to do according to the authentic moral teachings of the Magisterium. We need only deal with the question of survival.

American shall not go the way of Greece when she spends herself into oblivion. The economy of Greece I assume is less significant than the economy of Vermont. We shall not go the way of Spain. Spain I assume is economically equal to Washington State.

America shall fall as Rome fell, if there were no Byzantium to preserve our civilization, taking all the currencies of the world with us, and all the debts we owe the Chinese become worthless as a Continental.

We take the whole world with us when we go.

For the economy of the world is not built on material goods. The trains and trucks and tanks of gas, the buildings which once housed banks, the streets and wires and electrical poles shall all still stand, at least, for a season. But the economic activity known as banking, that is, the storing and lending of money at interest, comes to a halt if the currency is worthless. The labor of driving truck and pumping gas and generating current and moving down those streets, if found to have no reward, shall not be done, and all those trucks and trains and streets will be desolate, motionless, silent.

All the buildings and telegraph poles and motionless trains in the Weimar Republic were standing while men pushed wheelbarrows full of paper money to the store to buy bread, but those German men were the Danaids carrying sieves of water in hell, for the value of the paper money trickled away invisibly and swiftly even while they toiled.

Likewise, all our brave men and wise generals and gigantic Aircraft Carrier battlegroups, the largest and most deadly military machine history has even seen, will be as idle and worthless as those rusting trains and trucks, and as empty of use as the sieves of the Danaids or the Deutschmarks of the Weimar men. The modern army cannot live on loot, and if the money is gone, the soldiers cannot be paid, and the position of America as a hyperpower, or even a regional power, vanishes as swiftly as the British Empire after the World Wars.

The normal marketplace mechanisms to recover from such a disaster do not operate in a nation whose voting class and whose dependency class outnumber and outvote their productive class. This would be the result of a second Obama term.

Compare the economies of, say, Texas and California.   (here: http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_california.html and here: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/295422/texas-vs-california-revisited-chuck-devore) and contemplate the future of a second Obama term, with socialized medicine entrenched and protected by a political class of dependents, and “too-big-to-fail” as the official policy of the Federal Government, and every major industry in danger of ceasing to pour wealth into union coffers will become the next GM — and I mean every industry. If Obama gets a second term, we are all California.

It is an addiction like cocaine, and there is no recovery. Once a nation is government by a philosophy and by a majority faction that seeks free money, a crowd of slaves kissing their own chains and voting themselves pie today and devil take tomorrow, when tomorrow comes, alas, the devil arrives. That is the lesson we saw in Spain, in Greece, and in France. The voters voted themselves more pie. Each little faction has no reason in its self interest to do otherwise, and the mass of all factions together lack the will and discipline and philosophy and religion to endure the hardship caused by a previous generation voting itself pie on credit.

Now the credit is used up. The money is gone. All the money in the world is gone. In the next several decades, someone will have to do several TRILLION dollars worth of manhours of labor to produce goods and services in return for no reward, for the reward, the pie, has already been consumed.

Contemplate as well an ambitious China, and revived Russia, and an aggressive nuclear-armed Iran at large in a world were American and European power has been obliterated, and no cultural confidence exists in any persons outside the Sinosphere and the Dar-al-Islam. If the prospect of financial bankruptcy and military bankruptcy do not alarm the turgid soul, what of spiritual bankruptcy? Or do you think the various barbarians and tyrants of morbid and desolate nations who have never known freedom and enlightenment will look to a shattered West with the admiration and awe of, say, the Japanese after Admiral Perry?

Do you think they will try to Westernize when we are rapidly de-Westernizing? And by de-Westernizing, I mean pouring scorn on our own constitution, values, virtues and symbols while treating enemy symbols and values with quivering respect. I mean (to use one example out of countless) dunking the crucifix in urine and calling it “art” while at the same time jailing amateur filmmakers who insult “the Prophet of Islam”?

If we had financial strength without military power, we might recover, or if we had military power with financial strength, or if we had a firm belief and courage to follow our Christian faith or Western legacy of freedom, democracy, and the free market.

We have traded this all for a mess of pottage.

If only we had an even slightly honest press, we might yet recover, as and when the truth rang out across the nation like the call of Paul Revere.

A second Obama term proves we have none of these things and deserve none. It proves the American character has indeed collapsed beyond resuscitation.

A second Obama term means we have nothing but big government, bigger and bigger, and no room for anything else, neither local government, nor associations, nor churches, nor communities, nor families.

The parasite eats the host and dies.

Is this reason for voting clear enough? Do these fears seem excessive, unrealistic, or the figments of political hypochondria?