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Not What If – What Next (Part I: Morphine)

How Big Government Liberalism Becomes An Absorbing State

By: Repair_Man_Jack (Diary)  |  November 8th, 2012 at 12:00 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

You Can Check Out Any TIme You Like, But You Can Never Leave.


It was 2008, and Bill Whittle was an intelligent man deeply confounded. He wondered how in the heck people could consider voting for Junior Senator, Barack Obama as America’s next president. He finally hit on a valid analogy. He saw people in sudden, acute economic desperation and compared them to a patient in acute kidney distress. The white-hot pain gets to be intense; it shuts down your ratiocination. You fall deeply in love with the dude who promises you the shot of pain-killer which was exactly what Candidate Obama then promised. But why continue in 2012?

Well, let’s say the pain gets to be chronic. You’re still hurting forty days later, the doctor can’t fix it and the bills are stacked to your chin so you have to go to work hurting. You’d better take a little something and maybe put a stick between your teeth and suck it up. President Obama was overjoyed to hand out the little blue happy pills. Food Stamp enrollment shot up. Welfare benefits were extended, requirements for welfare reform got waived and disability applications grew faster than job creation. Such is the pharmacological brilliance of the Obama Economy. I’m not seeing any cures out there, but he’s sure got a new pill for whatever puts a gimp in your walk and makes it clear you can only get that little, magical pill from him.

It turned into a societal analog to what Operations Research Analysts describe as an absorbing state. Without getting too technical and boring you to sleep with a rap about Markov Chains, an absorbing state is a place where some object or system lands and then can’t get out. It’s like O’Hare Airport on an evening with mixed precipitation. You can plan whatever you like, but as Bob Dylan once sang “You ain’t goin’ nowhere.” You get there and you’d better love Big Brother. He owns you and your vote lock, stock and barrel.

So what do these people do? They vote to get their pain-killers. They feel like they have to and don’t want to hear any noise from Captain John Smith.* Thus, the people turn out and vote. A certain fatalistic desperation drives the turn-out. People feel no great love for Barack Obama, but they’re pretty much screwed if Mitt Romney takes away the EBT Card and the disability pension. A dependent stasis sets in and as long as theirs spare cash to fuel the burn-rate, a permanent recurrent electoral majority obtains. Hope and Change become an anathema to what keeps the current governing majority governing.

This, more than the racial demographics and immigration (which just killed GOP Senate candidates in MT, WI, ND…), could repetitively destroy any Conservative’s chance of winning election anywhere in America for the near-term future unless such cycle is broken. Obviously, unless you think money grows on trees and the taxpayers will bend over and put up with the amateur proctology for an indefinite time span, this will lead to a disaster.

We see the initial signs of trouble in how some in the business community are reacting to the Obama Victory. Boeing has greeted Tuesday’s electoral results with lay-off notices. The stock market apparently suffers butt-hurt at not being invited to the Elizabeth Warren Victory Soiree. This remains minor for now. These are a few reactions today, but will magnify in the coming months as taxes increase and smaller businesses shut down.

This new and more challenging reality leaves what’s left of the GOP holding power with two unpleasant alternatives that I will explore in two future posts. One option, what I call The Fabian Option, involves fighting a rear-guard action to block and water-down as much of the Obama Agenda as possible. The other option is The Doomsday Device Option of triggering the fiscal cliff, the government shut-down and any other crisis possible to make the US Senate actually budget and the Federal Government actually fund it’s expenditures so that people in power will be asked to make hard choices again.

Where we go from here will suck. Elections have consequences. But we can reason together, diagnose what’s wrong enough with America to make President Obama even possible and devise an intelligent alternative. Our children and grandchildren depend on us.

*-Who famously refrained St. Paul from 2 Thessalonians (3:10) stating “You don’t work; you don’t eat.”

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COMMENTS

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  • ceili_dancer

    I’m almost to the point of the Doomsday scenario. Living in CA, I have been living the second term of BHO. Then, we voted a tax increase against “them”, and a “temporary” sales tax to boot. This, because the governor held the schools and children hostage. The funny part will be in 6 months when tax receipts are lower than prjected they will be back at the trough to see if they can pump that dry well again.
    My prediction is that come 2020, CA will lose a district. I mean the on;y reason we gained again is through immigration, both legal and illegal, that bumped up the census count.
    To repeat, I am this close to “let it burn”.

  • Repair_Man_Jack

    If options exist elsewhere, leave CA.

  • Viet71

    My recommendation to the House Republicans: take the Cliff 1-1-13.

    Lots of Leftist dummies think the rich will take it in the pocketbook.

    Hah!

  • aeaeren

    I say LET IT BURN and California isn’t going to make it until 2020. Queen Nancy’s house got robbed and this is ONLY going to get worse as more and more are laid off due to business moving.

  • voiceoftruth

    Yes, because when the Republicans forced a government shutdown while up against Clinton, that totally didn’t hurt the Republicans in the next election….

    What you’re advocating has been tried before and HURT Republicans. Read up on it.

    Republicans cannot afford to lose in the House in 2014, or else Obama will have a Democratic House and Senate and will not need to worry about re-election – what do you think he’d do in that situation?

  • Repair_Man_Jack

    Exactly what he’ll start doing now if Boehner is not a legitimate opponent to his policies.

  • franklinwasright

    Education. I am a reformed liberal and a former teacher. The liberal ideaology is firmly entrenched in the public school system. Students are no longer taught to reason and use logic, they are taught to judge things based on feelings and impressions, and they are also taught what is politically correct, and they base their impressions on that.
    Conservatives need to get involved in education. We need more conservative teachers, principles, school board members. We need members of the community getting involved and demanding more tax payer control of what is taught in the schools. We need to wrestle control away from teacher’s unions.
    The rise of the nanny state coincides with the rise of the “progressive eduction” model. It is not a coincidence.
    Read “Climbing Parnassus” by Tracy Lee Simmons. It will convince you that American excpetionalism has always been due to the “classical education” model which was in place for centuries only to be abandoned by “modernists” in the 20th century, leading to the steady decline in literacy levels and cultural and historical knowledge within the populace.
    We need conservative activists in education to counter the progressive activists. This is a turf that should have never been ceded, and it needs to be taken back.

  • JSobieski

    Love the operations research/industrial engineering flashbacks.

  • General_Confusion

    You seem to be saying: If we do anything to oppose the Democrats WE LOSE!!!!!!!!!

    Question: We did nothing to oppose the Democrats in 2010 – 2012 while controlling the House and WE LOST, so we should go back to the same playbook again? (Setting aside that if we do nothing we will sail off the financial cliff at full throttle. If the House Republicans will do nothing with their last remaining power to the control the Federal purse what’s the point of having them there? We are WAY pass the time we need to act.)

    Additional thought: My involvement in politics is to accomplish real change, NOT to put more “R”’s on the scoreboard. At the point the “R”’s want to be/help the “D”’s I cease to have any use for them. It becomes a choice without a difference. Sadly Speaker of the House Boehner clearly has his left turn signal on right now.

  • kipling

    One of the best analysis I have read so far!

  • jpkoch

    You are under the impression that politics are static. This isn’t 1995. Look again at the exit polling numbers. The President, despite the amount of money (taxpayers money, btw) he showered on the middle and lower classes, lost 10% of his 2008 voters. And he had to spend $350 million across 6 swing states to get a million crucual votes. The Dems simply are not that popular. The GOP still got 49.5% of the vote. That is, the debt still matters to half of the nation. We’re headed for serious problems. The least of which is allowing the sequestration to kick in. No matter what Boehner does, this nation is headed for a fiscal crisis. There is simply no more money.

  • Steve Summers

    Maybe the solution is to let go of the rope.

    When playing Tug-o-War, giving the other team a little slack will just help them get better footing so they pull harder. But if you LET GO, the other team may just fall on their asses. When that happens, they’re much easier to drag into the mud puddle in the middle.

    So maybe what the Republicans should do is simply vote “Present” for the next two years. Announce it first, to let everyone know what they’re doing, and why – but stop blocking anything (economic) that Obama wants to do. (Note: I’m not advocating letting him pack the supreme court with lots more “Wise Latinas”.)

    Most of us here agree that Obama’s policies will just make the situation worse, but I think we have to let that happen. If we stop blocking the policies, then the economy won’t benefit from the stability of the gridlock and start to recover. Instead, the sheer stupidity of liberal “economics” will become evident to even the most ideology-blinded, and there’s NO WAY 0bama can continue to blame Bush or blame the Republicans for the lack of economic recovery. The mess he and the Democrats will create will be theirs, and theirs alone.

    Then in 2014, they can run on a platform saying “If you elect enough Republican senators and representatives, we’ll stop giving Obama a pass, and start passing legislation that will actually fix our problems. It will then be up to you, the public, to pressure 0bama to sign the bills. If he doesn’t, you can take it out on the Democrats in 2016.”

  • Steve Summers

    One other thought…

    We now hold 30 governorships and more than half of state legislatures, correct? Could we find a few more states less left-wing than Obama that are so sick of the feds shoving crap down their throats that they’d be willing to call for a constitutional convention? If so, is there any chance of getting 3/4 of them to amend the Commerce clause to require the states affected by an ACTUAL interstate commerce issue to ASK for federal intervention, so this can’t be used as an excuse to regulate EVERYTHING? Wouldn’t such a change make most of what the federal government wastes 24% of GDP on unconstitutional?

    Is there any chance of something like this passing 3/4 of the states?

  • lineholder

    Whatever is done, RMJ, I hope it will come quickly! The timeline for action is extremely limited! Have you seen the new CBO report?
    http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/11-08-12-FiscalTightening.pdf

    Business owners have been holding out until the outcomes of the election were determined. Small business owners in particular will have to make decisions relatively quickly.
    http://www.atr.org/four-small-business-tax-hikes-obamacare-a6788

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