Welfare

I regard welfare to be a serious, difficult topic. It began as a tragic historical fluke. Britain was a monarchy, with a small number of lords, ladies, landed gentry, and millions of serfs whose hard lot in life had been slightly improved by steam engines, industry, and coal fires in cold brick hovels. Health care was primitive and costly. Karl Marx argued for revolution. Playwright George Bernard Shaw argued for public welfare -- municipal gas, water and sewer socialism for the working class. It was practical, necessary 'Fabianism' to defuse Marxist revolution and allow the ruling elite to retain enjoyment of heriditary privilege and West End plays.

Flash forward to today's socialist Britain, free housing, free medical care, free food, rampant drug use celebrated in the movie Trainspotting -- a thuggish, sullen underclass amplified by millions of Asian and African refugees from the formerly grand global empire that the Crown was compelled to relinquish because Britain was broke, the price of socialism and nonprofit war with Germany twice in a single generation. Over a million young Brits were sacrificed in battle, good strong white working class men led by blueblood officers. The rest of the nation had been conscripted to build warships and Spitfires, to harvest and tin awful field rations for doomed troops. Without vast military resources provided by the United States, Britain might have ceased to exist as an island nation in 1944. Without trillions in U.S. Treasury bonds and derivatives to fuel City of London banking, there would be no socialist Britain in 2017.

I lived in Britain twice, a couple years in Scotland, a couple years in London, did some of my best work as a filmmaker, TV director, writer and novelist there, had great fun with stars in the swish West End and Mayfair. I hired Lady Foxwell as a publicist. I also visited NHS doctors and paid Harley Street specialists to fix my teeth. If anyone is qualified to venture an opinion of British socialism, I believe that I am. I covered a Labour Party conference for ITV and ORF. They sang 'The Internationale' with gusto -- theme song of Marxism, trade unionism, state subsidy of hapless stooges employed to build unreliable luxury cars at a loss, more free shit to support the unemployable, the elderly, a generation of red brick college students and wannabe musicians, many of whom were pretty damn good. Britain flatters itself as a fount of show business talent with dishonest justification, citing Dickens, Shakespeare, and The Beatles as national achievements. Individualism is a somewhat vague concept in Blighty. A night spent drinking in a pub is their notion of a jolly good time, standing cheek by jowl with loud chums and loose women, followed by greasy fish and chips or tandoori.

What this has to do with the United States -- so far, as described above -- is our historical role in funding British decline. It's difficult to estimate how much unearned booty we gave them. Their entire fleet of nuclear submarines and commercial aircraft were subsidized by socialist America, nonprofit world cop, following in the footsteps of English Fabians for the unearned benefit of less productive Brits and Africans and Italians and Russians. Does it sound odd that we poured tens of billions in handouts to Russia, after the fall of communism? It shouldn't. The United States knows no limit of international charity, public and private. We funded the Israeli war machine, guaranteed that Israel would always have oil, housing projects, defacto supremacy, and payola to keep blood adversaries like Egypt under the fist of dictatorship.

It does not matter that U.S. motives were 'pure of heart,' or whether that's true or false. The business of charity does not comprehend or heed right and wrong. We spent a trillion to help American blacks, wasted every penny and institutionalized a permanent welfare underclass, destroying Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Camden. Our charity in subsidizing higher education for the stupid destroyed the integrity of universities from coast to coast, groomed a U.S. President who taught communism and class war, endless and endemic white guilt. He and his welfare state pals in Congress destroyed health care by mandating perpetual dependency on Medicaid, Medicare, and FDR-era Social Security, triple ponzi schemes that cannot be sustained for more than a few years, assuming that people will continue to buy U.S. Treasury debt. Whether anyone can or will in Britain is uncertain. Their banking system is in crisis again. The Saudis are upside down financially, nearly insolvent -- another painfully good joke, since we discovered oil in Arabia, developed Ghawar, gave them a market to sell oil, armed the Kingdom, and turned a blind eye to their vicious police state. In perfect symmetry of payback, a Saudi cleric and 15 Saudi nationals attacked us on 9/11 and destroyed a nonprofit Port Authority landmark that housed Zionist-owned Cantor Fitzgerald, the global sales scam with near monopoly in trading U.S. Treasury debt.

How much more bizarre can charity get? Plenty. A trillion dollars  to destroy Vietnam, then two trillion to destroy Iraq, withdrawing from both countries with no discernable benefit to America or any of the stupified survivors wandering in poisoned rubble. Three trillion more to prepare North and South Korea, Japan, China, India and Pakistan for nuclear war.

'General welfare' is mentioned in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, often cited to shove outrageously stupid legislation and regulation down people's throats and pour trillions into sewers of graft. For two centuries, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Preamble was not a substantive grant of power, merely an etheral statement of undefinable generality. Grants of power to the Federal government were specifically enumerated by the text of Articles I-V, including a process to ratify amendments. We never ratified an amendment to make the United States a welfare state. Congress used the power to regulate interstate commerce as an excuse to cripple American commerce and American common law property rights.

In 1999, Milton Friedman gave a televised speech to an ISIL conference in Costa Rica that was sponsored by Laissez Faire City. Friedman spoke about the tired old creed of Fabianism and the profound harm it had done to America. He predicted that new principles of libertarianism would prevail and reverse the damage done by idiotic socialism. The election of George W. Bush by a hair's breadth of plurality and a controversial ballot recount in Florida was seen as a step toward sunshine, after Bill Clinton mortgaged the economy to toxic assets that would blow up investment banking and derivatives during W.'s second term in office, re-elected by acclamation after destroying Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with attacking us on 9/11. Whatever Milton Friedman fancied as global destiny to rediscover liberty was silly. America instituted a 'patriotic' police state after 9/11, which somehow includes Black Lives Matter, an excuse to kill cops and intimidate university students, keep white speakers off campus.

The upside-down world of evil triumphing over good is the grim work of charity. Whether it's done by government or private empires like Annenberg and Carnegie foundations, the result is always the same, good people punished and evil rewarded. Bill and Melinda Gates are busy rewarding evil in Africa, shoulder to shoulder with USAID and a profoundly corrupt UNESCO. Of all the calamities inflicted on mankind, nothing can top the damage done by nonprofit, tax exempt institutions of religion, the Catholic Church and Islam in particular but not uniquely. Jews and Protestants are equally guilty of bending the levers of finance, entertainment and government policy to do wrong in the guise of righteousness and piety.

America today faces the same quandry that inspired Fabianism in England over a century ago with disasterous results. Our ruling class of 'The 1%' is no different than lords and ladies who kept great estates and serving girls, while serfs begged for bread in the streets. U.S. Fabians in Hollywood and Washington DC and state legislatures wail that we have to feed the hungry and pay people to do less, to ignore the problem of labor, savings, and capital investment. "Investment" nowadays means a fat subsidy for Tesla and solar panels made in China, more debt, more overseas military operations, burning subsidized biofuel that costs twice as much as nasty old oil. The U.S. Postal Service can't be disbanded, although it loses billions annually, because USPS delivers subsidized Amazon playthings from subsidized distribution centers.

The 1% are happy to play benefactor, for the same reason that English aristocrats went along with prominent West End superstars and reformers. Warren Buffett is willing to pay more in taxes, he says, the same rate as his secretary does, which is almost nothing after deductions and exemptions. The disaster of Expanded Medicaid and Obamacare will lead irresistibly to a 'single payer' national health service like Britain, our spiritual guru of national charity. Black Lives Matter has become an institution, Federally subsidized and empowered to rule college experience forever, backed by DOJ's Civil Rights Division. By every measure, Americans are becoming sicker, more obese, and less happy. Schools are a cesspool of government failure, incapable of teaching anyone anything, serving thuggish students free breakfast, lunch and dinner partly at taxpayer expense, but most of it borrowed with Federal debt. Municipalities and states are broke, can't pay current expenses or lavish retirement for public servants.

That's the ugly career of welfare, to wreck everything. What we should do as Americans is to think of our families and loved ones, ignore whatever claim government and religion makes to rob us for the unearned satisfaction of people we despise. If you want to aid a neighbor, that's fine. Offering him work is good policy, strengthens your neighborhood or locality. It's a valid method of improving society, to employ people at whatever wage you agree together, without government telling you how and when and skimming a cut for bureaucracy -- which is the whole goddamn game of government in a nutshell, a mailed fist to extort money for drones who do as little as possible and give nothing but pain, like bent nose mafioso. Their Ivy League law degrees and balloon drops at party conventions are paid for by the sweat of your brow, the callouses on a tradesmen's hands, serfs and suckers who do physical work, a doctor's training and skilled devotion, a small business among hundreds of thousands who employ half of all Americans, the farmers and mechanics who sustain human life, utilities and rural co-ops and investor owned enterprises, roughnecks who produce oil and gas.

If you feel you must be politically active, campaign to bring the troops home, to cut welfare spending, to make government smaller. Educate your children privately, prepare them to go forward in life, learn a skilled trade to feed themselves. Discourage charity and drug use or binge drinking. Teach them to choose friends carefully, to discriminate. Never assume that a smile is benevolent. Politicians, priests, and con artists smile. Barack Obama smiled.