I have another video I'd like your input on.

[happyg]

People who lived through the depression acted differently. My grandfather was a spendthrift. He said back then, he didn't have a nickel to spend, and 'now' he has a dollar and , "By damn, I'm going to spend it." Grandma, though, hoarded money. She quilted and did crochet work to earn money, and did pretty good.

My father paid cash for everything. We had no money, but somehow, he eked out a savings and, when we got older, invested. He was always frugal, and Mom got after all of us were grown, so she could buy nice things. Mom retired right after Dad, and they moved to Florida. After dad died, 2 1/2 years ago, he left her well-off. On one hand, she was relieved that he left her able to fend for herself, but on the other hand, she was angry they lived so sparingly.

[alicewonders]

My grandparents on both sides lived through it. My dad's parents had their dairy farm and they survived - but my grandmother hoarded money until the day she died as a result and paid cash for everything  - a very good habit IMHO.  My mothers parents lost everything and they had to move from a beautiful big house out to the country into a small home.  I honestly do not think my mother ever recovered from that experience and I think it is what made her the way she was all my life. It never mattered how much money she had in her mind she was ALWAYS poor...

My husband's grandmother told me that she and her family lost the home they lived in twice - lost everything.  My maternal grandmother was left widowed with five children to feed (she used the little bit of insurance from her husband's death to open a small country grocery store & worked it until she retired in her seventies).  She hoarded money until the day she died too.  I think we've had it too good and we are fat and lazy by it.  We have no comprehension of what hard living really is! 

The thing is, I think we may be about to find out.   

[Rapunzel]

My husband's grandmother told me that she and her family lost the home they lived in twice - lost everything.  My maternal grandmother was left widowed with five children to feed (she used the little bit of insurance from her husband's death to open a small country grocery store & worked it until she retired in her seventies).  She hoarded money until the day she died too.  I think we've had it too good and we are fat and lazy by it.  We have no comprehension of what hard living really is! 

The thing is, I think we may be about to find out.   

I do, too.

Want an example I heard on Wilkow this afternoon of how corrupt our system has become?

When Newt pushed through welfare reform under Clinton they had a mandatory work requirement. This work requirement did a good job in bringing down unemployment and welfare.  Along comes Obama and an EO suspending this congressionally mandated work requirement. Then - as we all know he started pushing food stamps which has ballooned. 

Now the kicker here.. the people charged by our government with the job of routing out welfare fraud, food stamp fraud, etc... well they don't want to rout it out... because it is job security for them...
 
This reminded me of something a friend in California told be a couple of months ago - they have prosecuted almost zero Californian's for Workers Comp Fraud in the state. Oh they have investigators, but for some reason no one ever gets prosecuted - even when they KNOW the person is committing it.  I suspect it is the same "job security" for the investigator story.

[Rapunzel]

I honestly don't know a lot about Rand Paul. If his stances on banks and drugs are the same as Ron I would vote for him.

So you think drugs are good?

 So tell us.  What is your frame of reference.   What have you read.  Have you read

Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America

The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World

Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto

The Federalist Papers

The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic

Downsizing the Federal Goverment

Brave New World

Comeback America: Turning the Country Around and Restoring Fiscal Responsibility

Common Sense, The Rights of Man and Other Essential Writings of Thomas Paine? 

America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture

The Original Argument: The Federalists' Case for the Constitution, Adapted for the 21st Century

The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party

Culture and Imperialism

Coolidge

Why Coolidge Matters: How Civility in Politics Can Bring a Nation Together

The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government

Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin 

Franklin: The Essential Founding Father

Seven Events That Made America America: And Proved That the Founding Fathers Were Right All Along

The Road to Serfdom

Lies The Government Told You: Myth, Power, And Deception In American History

The Signers: The Fifty Six Stories Behind The Declaration Of Independence

Samuel Adams: A Life Samuel Adams: A Life

Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point

[Bigun]

if only he'd read it and some it would sink in.  I lived through Carter, (and Nixon) it is one reason I revere Reagan.

I second that! Great post!

[EC]

So you think drugs are good?

 So tell us.  What is your frame of reference.   What have you read.  Have you read

Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America

The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World

Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto

The Federalist Papers

The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic

Downsizing the Federal Goverment

Brave New World

Comeback America: Turning the Country Around and Restoring Fiscal Responsibility

Common Sense, The Rights of Man and Other Essential Writings of Thomas Paine? 

America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture

The Original Argument: The Federalists' Case for the Constitution, Adapted for the 21st Century

The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party

Culture and Imperialism

Coolidge

Why Coolidge Matters: How Civility in Politics Can Bring a Nation Together

The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government

Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin 

Franklin: The Essential Founding Father

Seven Events That Made America America: And Proved That the Founding Fathers Were Right All Along

The Road to Serfdom

Lies The Government Told You: Myth, Power, And Deception In American History

The Signers: The Fifty Six Stories Behind The Declaration Of Independence

Samuel Adams: A Life Samuel Adams: A Life

Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point

Excellent reading list! Couple I haven't read yet.

[Rapunzel]

Excellent reading list! Couple I haven't read yet.

I could have listed all the Clinton (Hillary and Bill) - for instance

The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories

Dereliction of Duty: Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America's National Security

Unlimited Access : An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House

Absolute Power: The Legacy of Corruption in the Clinton-Reno Justice Department

and this book is a must read IMHO...

Betrayal: How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security

In addition...

The Puzzle Palace (about the founding of the NSA)

 The Real Jimmy Carter: How Our Worst Ex-President Undermines American Foreign Policy, Coddles Dictators and Created... by Hayward, Steven F. (May 25, 2004)

Reagan's Secret War

and with the 50'th anniversary of his assassination approaching:

The Road to Dallas

[famousdayandyear]

Excellent reading list! Couple I haven't read yet.

Good morning EC

May I add the following BASIC TEXTS to Rap's excellent list:

1) Democracy in America (Alexis de Tocqueville)
2) The Road to Serfdom (Friedrich von Hayek)  NB:  Suggested this to LS eons ago

(NB:  The Hayek treatise was already listed.  My error)

[Rapunzel]

Good morning EC

May I add the following BASIC TEXTS to Rap's excellent list:

1) Democracy in America (Alexis de Tocqueville)
2) The Road to Serfdom (Friedrich von Hayek)  NB:  Suggested this to LS eons ago

Excellent suggestions.

Perhaps we need a suggested reading section here, I am certain there is some excellent material others can add as well.

[Rapunzel]

When my husband was alive and we had our boat, I would take books out on the lake and read all day.. and then when we went to Lake Powell I would tote a huge bag of books with me... oh for a Kindle back in those days.

[EC]

Good morning EC

May I add the following BASIC TEXTS to Rap's excellent list:

1) Democracy in America (Alexis de Tocqueville)
2) The Road to Serfdom (Friedrich von Hayek)  NB:  Suggested this to LS eons ago

(NB:  The Hayek treatise was already listed.  My error)

I would add

The Prince (Machiavelli)
The Art of War (sun tzu)
My Life (Bill Clinton) - I know, but it is literally a text book of how to advance.

And, if fiction is permitted:

Catch 22 (Joseph Heller)

[massadvj]

I'll add some modern books, and they are entertaining books as well.  The first author will surprise you, but the book he wrote may well be the best treatise yet written on the decline of American civilization in the second half of the 20th century.  It is must reading for any conservative.

American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Man in Full by Tom Wolfe

[Liberal_Spy]

So you think drugs are good?

I think it's wrong to spend 35-40 billion dollars a year on a failed drug war that perpetuates the problems in black communities and helps militarize the police. Legalize the drugs, tax them, and use the taxes to build rehabs to help drug addicts. You can get legal over the counter drugs that are just as bad as anything you find on the street.

[EC]

I'll add some modern books, and they are entertaining books as well.  The first author will surprise you, but the book he wrote may well be the best treatise yet written on the decline of American civilization in the second half of the 20th century.  It is must reading for any conservative.

American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Man in Full by Tom Wolfe

Think I am gonna disagree with Roth being on the list? Ain't gonna happen. 

Was dozing and thinking - If we are still permitting fiction, add Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein. Sure, more libertarian than conservative, but a huge cross over.

I was blessed enough to meet him once. Some dumb ass kid with stars in his eyes, bugging some old, grumpy and immensely respected author. He made me work for me chat - we talked all day and worked like hell while doing so, hauling rock and digging.

[EC]

I think it's wrong to spend 35-40 billion dollars a year on a failed drug war that perpetuates the problems in black communities and helps militarize the police. Legalize the drugs, tax them, and use the taxes to build rehabs to help drug addicts. You can get legal over the counter drugs that are just as bad as anything you find on the street.

Going to throw something out there - with comments - courtesy of AA, the only damned reason I am still breathing:


    We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

It does not need be alcohol. Drug culture is as powerful and as evil.

    Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

This might be where we disagree. I hold to God and personal responsibility as the cure. You seem to see it as a government problem.

    Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

Again. Personal responsibility. If you bleep up, if you drink or drug to excess, ain't no one forcing you but the defective wiring in your own brain. You have no one else to blame but yourself.

    Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

See above - that scares the shit out of everyone. God hates a coward.

    Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Do you know how hard this is? It is hard enough admitting we are wrong on a forum where there is no real comeback. Try doing it when your entire life is a mess.

    Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

This one I got problems with. A work in progress. Skip, for the moment. You don't need to do the steps in order. 

While I don't necessarily disagree with you regarding legalization, I suggest you look deeper. Drug use is not only rampant, it is prevalent. It might be worth the time to examine why that is the case.

Boredom?
Lack of faith?
Just the way life is?

[massadvj]

I think it's wrong to spend 35-40 billion dollars a year on a failed drug war that perpetuates the problems in black communities and helps militarize the police. Legalize the drugs, tax them, and use the taxes to build rehabs to help drug addicts. You can get legal over the counter drugs that are just as bad as anything you find on the street.

You might be surprised to find some people here who agree with you on most of that, myself included.  We don't consider it to be the most pressing issue of the day, however.  Restoring fundamental American liberties, especially economic freedom, is far more important, and I'll tell you why.  We don't want there to be more crack whores, and that will require a higher level of morality than exists in society today.  If you want to improve morality, you must increase freedom and release people from the bonds of government dependency.  A high degree of morality cannot exist without freedom. 

"It is, on the one hand, an old discovery that morals and moral values will grow only in an en­vironment of freedom, and that, in general, moral standards of people and classes are high only where they have long enjoyed freedom—and proportional to the amount of freedom they have pos­sessed."...Friedrich Hayek

The above is just a snippet on an excellent discourse on this subject.  Here's a link to the whole thing:

http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-moral-element-in-free-enterprise#ixzz2iAeWj7o9

PS: I am certain Ron Paul would agree with Hayek on this.

[massadvj]

Think I am gonna disagree with Roth being on the list? Ain't gonna happen. 

Was dozing and thinking - If we are still permitting fiction, add Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein. Sure, more libertarian than conservative, but a huge cross over.

I was blessed enough to meet him once. Some dumb ass kid with stars in his eyes, bugging some old, grumpy and immensely respected author. He made me work for me chat - we talked all day and worked like hell while doing so, hauling rock and digging.

Just about anything by Heinlein is worth reading.

I can't think of a better way to get to know someone than by doing construction work with him.  My differences between my stepsons and I seemed irreconcilable until we built an add-on together.

[aligncare]

I don't support or advocate communism, and I regularly school liberals that do.

Sounds like you may in actuality be a "compassionate conservative"—a term I hate—minus the abortion integrity, you just don't know it yet. By the way, in case you didn't know, there is a pro-abortion wing of Republicans—or, at least there are agnostics on the subject.

[massadvj]

Sounds like you may in actuality be a "compassionate conservative"—a term I hate—minus the abortion integrity, you just don't know it yet. By the way, in case you didn't know, there is a pro-abortion wing of Republicans—or, at least there are agnostics on the subject.

I myself am pro-choice, at least as far as federal law is concerned.  I consider abortion highly immoral, but I don't believe fetuses have rights. 

That is never good enough for liberals.  They want me to support the idea of stealing the money from conscientious, moral people who, like me, consider abortion repulsive, in order to pay for someone else's abortion.  And if I object, I am "anti-woman" in spite of the fact that more than half the babies killed with my tax money are female.

[aligncare]

It actually answers all three.

Now, unlike a lot of people on the right - I believe that environmental regulations are a thing. You can not be a conservative without being willing to conserve. But other than those, there should be zero regulations standing in the way of new business ....

Government is an impotent middleman, sucking money from the productive. Government is an unnecessary and burdensome overhead. They steal our money then lord over us using the compassion and pseudoscience ruse. The framers would never have tolerated what the government has become today.

[EC]

They certainly would not.

Yet you are old enough to remember Lake Erie being dead and the Cuyahoga River fire. If you kill what is basically an inland freshwater sea or set a river on fire, you are really doing something wrong.

[aligncare]

Point taken, but my point is it is getting worse. Income equality is still getting worse, more people are sinking below the poverty line, and the rich are still getting richer. It shouldn't be as bad as it is.

Wait one cotton picking minute. Have you seen what the poor have today? Smart phones and big-screen TVs— that's what they have! In the meanwhile my income as a doctor has been ravaged by taxation and burdensome regulations. Do you know I make less today than I did my first year in practice nearly 30 years ago! Practice for me is a nightmare. Talk to other doctors, privately. You'll get an earful.

[Bigun]

You might be surprised to find some people here who agree with you on most of that, myself included.  We don't consider it to be the most pressing issue of the day, however.  Restoring fundamental American liberties, especially economic freedom, is far more important, and I'll tell you why.  We don't want there to be more crack whores, and that will require a higher level of morality than exists in society today.  If you want to improve morality, you must increase freedom and release people from the bonds of government dependency.  A high degree of morality cannot exist without freedom. 

"It is, on the one hand, an old discovery that morals and moral values will grow only in an en­vironment of freedom, and that, in general, moral standards of people and classes are high only where they have long enjoyed freedom—and proportional to the amount of freedom they have pos­sessed."...Friedrich Hayek

The above is just a snippet on an excellent discourse on this subject.  Here's a link to the whole thing:

http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-moral-element-in-free-enterprise#ixzz2iAeWj7o9

PS: I am certain Ron Paul would agree with Hayek on this.

Yes indeed! I to am one of them but my argument may differ somewhat.

I contend that it is impossible to have personal liberty without personal responsibility. Those two things are inextricably linked together which means that if you choose to do drugs and have to steal from me or harm me in any other way in order to support that then I'm going to hold you accountable for that harm no matter WHY you did it! 

I guess that really doesn't differ all that much from what Victor said when I think about it.

I agree completely with what Hayek had to say in the above quote.

[EC]

Wait one cotton picking minute. Have you seen what the poor have today? Smart phones and big-screen TVs— that's what they have! In the meanwhile my income as a doctor has been ravaged by taxation and burdensome regulations. Do you know I make less today than I did my first year in practice nearly 30 years ago! Practice for me is a nightmare. Talk to other doctors, privately. You'll get an earful.

Back in 1991, I were teaching. We had a questionnaire come out to see how many of our students were below the poverty line. One of the questions was "Do you have a VCR?" In our department, apparently all but oe of us was below the poverty line,

[Bigun]

Wait one cotton picking minute. Have you seen what the poor have today? Smart phones and big-screen TVs— that's what they have! In the meanwhile my income as a doctor has been ravaged by taxation and burdensome regulations. Do you know I make less today than I did my first year in practice nearly 30 years ago! Practice for me is a nightmare. Talk to other doctors, privately. You'll get an earful.

 

As has already been said by others above we REALLY need to get away from this dependency society and get back to one where individuals are self motivated to do whatever it takes to deliver themselves from their current circumstance regardless of what that may be! To site an example, I am fully convinced that one of the main reasons our country has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world is our idiot tax code! The kid who goes out and get's a legitimate job making hamburgers at McDonald's pays a heck of a price over the one who goes out and pushes drugs, pimps, whores or whatever and that would NOT be the case IF we had a tax code that did not discriminate!

Citing what you said above Doc, how do you think a tax code that required you to collect a sales tax on the services you rendered but allowed you to keep ALL of your income until you actually purchased a new good or service (not for your business but for your personal consumption only)  would work for you?

If we, as a nation, had REALLY been all that concerned about a "separation of Church and state" we would have been marching in the streets when the government began taking over traditional roles of the Church!