Reflections From a Murky Pond

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation since long before the White Man reached America’s shores, says that, “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.”

This is certainly sound wisdom, if not especially profound in any way.

The “wisdom” of America’s government, however, took a different approach to the Dead Horse Theory and tends towards other responses than getting off the horse’s carcass:

1. Changing riders
2. Appointing a committee to study the horse
3. Arranging trips to other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses
4. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included
5. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired
6. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse
7. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase efficiency
8. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse’s performance
9. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance
10. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some live horses
11. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses
12. Blaming some group for raising or buying an unfair number of live horses
13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Now I know that innovation is predicated upon thinking laterally and “outside of the box,” but has anyone ever managed to get where they were going by flogging a dead horse?

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The Lamestream MSM seems to be in a bit of a quandary as to what spin to put on the Occupy Wall St. “movement.” They’re spending near equal time trying to paint them as more acceptable than the TEA Party and trying to play up the similarities between the two groups.

To be fair, the is a slight basis for the comparison. Both groups identified that there was and is a problem with America’s economic systems and “took to the streets” in order to make their voices heard. That’s as far as the similarity goes though. Very quickly the intrinsic natures of the participants showed themselves and the two movements diverged into Americanism vs. Liberalism.

That’s the way of it. The only comparison between the patriots of the TEA Party and the slackers of the OWS mob is that both groups realize that the political-economic “system” in America is broken and needs repairs that nearly amount to a rebuild. They are, however, antithetical to each other when it comes to how the system is broken, why it’s broken, and what a fixed system even looks like.

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NOTE: This only pertains to those OWS insurgents that have an economic agenda and doesn’t apply to- or necessarily include the plethora of other Leftists with unrelated manifestos that have gathered with them in a generalized “emo” tantrum.

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As it was, so shall it be. The details and the victims might change, but the song – a dirge for profit and jobs in this case – remains the same.

Government: I’ve Been Working On The Railroad

The Albuquerque Tribune was right on June 14, 1958 when they printed this cartoon and, if they changed the setting to reflect an industry that hadn’t yet been quasi-nationalized, they’d be right again today.

Nothing really changes. Government regulations quickly become archaic and cannot adapt to the changes in the marketplace. Likewise, they normally involve taxes design to fund government programs at the expense of business and those that business employs.

That doesn’t mean that all regulation and taxation is bad but it does mean that Americans must look upon them with jaundiced eyes, full in the knowledge that the agendas of those pushing for these things is likely to be antithetical to the vey foundations of American society and enterprise.

Posted with a grateful H/T to Yesteryear Once More.

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