On Obama, Common Sense, And Maoism

Obama is taking the USSA down the tubes – what with his socialized medical care. Lew Rockwell has a terrifying diagram of the many layers of bureaucracy that Obama will create. In the meantime, Mint has a “quick edit” on the fact that Warren Buffet’s bonds are seen by The Market as less risky and less prone to default than US government bonds – and their tongue-in-cheek remark is that things will only worsen for the USSA with the bigger deficit that socialized medical care will entail.

I predict that if things continue the way they are, the USSA will turn into Bihar – where they will have so many government welfare programmes eating up all the (fiat paper) money that they won’t have funds left over to even maintain existing roads, forget about constructing new ones.

There is a great lesson in this for India today – where the Maoists have just blown up the tracks and derailed the prestigious Rajdhani Express.

I am reminded of the opening lines of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776):

SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil, in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamities are heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer! Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.

This little pamphlet guided the Americans in 1776. This Common Sense is lost now in the USSA. And, in India, where this book was never read, things are going from bad to worse. Our situation is best summed up by these words of Paine:

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil, in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamities are heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer!