We Won't Go Back!
The Progressive Mantra
During the recent presidential debate between Kamala Harris, the appointed presidential candidate of the “Democratic” Party, and Donald Trump, the elected nominee of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, Vice President Harris’s opening statements included the phrase, “We Won’t Go Back”. Upon hearing this phrase I was immediately reminded of a small placard — one among many placards — on a neighbor’s door that bears the same phrase. Behind the door lies a miserable alcoholic woman who does little in my presence, but spew hateful thoughts in my face. Her own expressed explanation for this venom is my expressed support for Donald J. Trump and the MAGA movement. I barely recall the one and only political discussion that I ever had with her, and indeed it was brief. Once she understood that I had little good to say about the Democrat machinery that runs the City of Seattle, King County, and most of Western Washington, she would no longer speak to, or of me, but in the most derogatory of terms.
In contrast, I receive in my email inbox political literature from political candidates from both sides of the political spectrum and elsewhere. Everyday I read as political candidates — mostly Democrats and Republicans — ask me for money to support their candidacy. Indeed, a very large portion of my email is of this type. It is interesting to observe how both sides are so much alike when it comes to eliciting donations for their respective political causes.
Now, it is true that I am more inclined to donate money to a political campaign or cause, than I am to donate to a charity to help the needy — and this, for the simple reason that I believe that my money is better spent toward addressing the issues of the nation as a whole than select groups of individuals seeking to help others whom I have never met. Political parties and politicians do make a difference in the lives of all Americans, and in the case of American political parties and politicians, the world as a whole.
Today, our political parties and politicians have command over an endless supply of purchasing power that is used to cater to the needs of various private and public government lobbyists who command the attention of both our elected and non-elected public officials for the purpose of extracting real wealth from each other and the rest of us. When you are very wealthy it takes very little of your total fortune to enrich the pockets of certain key, elected and appointed, public officials who make, enforce, and adjudicate the rules and laws of the markets on which you depend for your fortune. This is not, however, where it ends.
When these same public officials can easily increase the money available to them for the purchase of the real goods and services required to implement, promote, and maintain their respective government programs, and when these real goods and services are supplied by the same very wealthy who lobby these officials for special market privileges to enhance their ability to compete within their own respective markets, there should be no doubt as to why government is becoming ever larger and those who service it with their goods and services ever wealthier.
I am explaining this to you so that you might better understand what a politician truly means when he or she says that he has no intention of ever going back. For, moving forward under the current system means ever bigger government, an ever larger transfer of real wealth upward to the powerful and wealthy few, and an ever greater transfer of real wealth downward to those who actively promote the even larger transfer of real wealth upward. What is being created before our very eyes in real time is a socialist state and the destruction of voluntary free markets. It is a highly integrated network of collaboration between the wealthy few and the elected and appointed public officials who service these wealthy individuals and those in the general public who approve this monied admixture of communist ideology and fascist control of all economic activity.
Unfortunately, it is not only the Kamala Harris’s of America who promote individual freedom while simultaneously supporting this transfiguration of the voluntary, free market place. These same people can be found on both sides of the political aisle in large numbers. It is simply the case that more of them are found on one side than on the other, and that together they represent the majority of those whom we elect into office and who finish by appointing and selecting everyone else who contributes to the overall effort.
Our nation was founded on the principles of economic and political freedom, because our founding fathers understood that it is these freedoms that are fundamental to all other freedoms. For, without the ability to provide for yourself you become dependent on government for your livelihood. Our nation is becoming the “children” of government. This is a huge mistake, if individual freedom is truly that for which we stand.
The so-called liberal left has substituted economic and political freedom with calls for sexual freedom, as if what each of us did in our own bedroom behind closed doors was anyone’s business, but our own in the first place. And, when the same people, who rally today around calls for the autonomy of a woman’s body and the right to abortion, repeatedly speak out against the calls for the autonomy of everyone else’s body when it comes to mandatory experimental gene therapy posing as a vaccine, we should all realize that sexual promiscuity has been placed above all other American freedoms in the mind of a large number of those who still insist that they are American.
When online pornography first appeared I was impressed and quickly became an active consumer. Initially I was overwhelmed by the notion of the private consumption of individual public expression that most would never provide or consume in a public setting. Indeed, online pornography was something that everyone could consume, but no one was required.
Although it formed a part of the public domain, it was not a homeless vagrant defecating on the street, for example. It was not in your face. Rather, it was an essential and pleasurable human act that was being celebrated online in the public domain and often very artistically. I was so grateful on occasion that I would even write to those who provided it in an effort to encourage them to engage in more. It never made any sense to me that people would pay for something that was so freely available. As a person who believes in the right of individual self-expression and appreciates the self-expression of others, I even felt a certain pressure to expose myself before others in the same way that others had made themselves available to me. I believe in reciprocity. Then too, the deeper I dug into the world of porn the more repulsed I became with what I was seeing and gradually abandoned it altogether. This said, I can well imagine children who have reached puberty who would be deeply attracted to it, and easily led astray as a consequence.
Alas, sexuality is an important part of the human experience. It is, however, no substitute for economic and political freedom — especially when an important driver of sexual promiscuity is the repeated destruction of human life in a mother’s womb.
The direction in which American society is headed today goes completely against the governing principles on which our nation was founded. And, our current monetary system is, by far, the single most important contributor to the current ruinous trend. Politicians, bureaucrats, and academicians who refuse to discuss this issue forthrightly and frequently are simply not to be trusted. Either they are ignorant of something so crucial to our economic and political present and future, or they are actively and knowingly seeking our nation’s demise. Either way the ignorant are culpable, for their ignorance makes them easily manipulated by those who know better and are filled with self-aggrandizing, malicious intent.
I have met many an individual who believes that the great American experiment has failed, and who sincerely believe that we must try something knew. In my mind, the great American experiment has never been properly conducted. For the financial crisis that looms on the horizon today is the same that has been with us since the outset; it is simply now graver and more threatening than it has ever been before.
In liberty,
Roddy A. Stegemann, First Hill, Seattle 98104
Author of Mount Cambitas - The Story of Real Money and “A Call for the Restoration of Monetary Order”