The Cycle of Incompetence, Fear, and Dependence

History has taught us many valuable lessons. Too bad we continue to make the same mistakes. A good friend pointed out a valuable premise in what most societies from the Roman Empire to the present have in common when chaos rules. First, there is incompetent leadership which insights fear into the public as conditions worsen. Finally, the masses become dependent and cling to a new form of government or regime. Look at what the Great Depression created around the world. As incompetent leaders took us into the depression and fear grew around the globe, the masses became dependent on tyrants who gave a message of hope. Thus, Hitler and Stalin came to power despite radical views. In the U.S., things did not get as bad as Hitler and Stalin, but things certainly changed. FDR promoted and got support for a more socialistic society. In fact, many of FDR’s socialistic views are still present today and causing us headaches such as Social Security.

We can see the same thing occurring today in the U.S with the financial crisis. We have incompetent leadership, not only in the Executive Branch with President Bush, but in Congress as well. Let’s not forget that the Judicial Branch, which is not serving the people by ruling on cases based on partisanship, opinion, and bias and not on the law. The U.S. public has also played a big role on the incompetence front. People continually live beyond their means and get greedy. People have been running astronomical debts that they can not repay. People get involved in financial bubbles by borrowing money in an attempt to get rich quick without using commonsense or rationale about the consequences if the bubble bursts. People never believe the bubble will burst. That is naive because all bubbles burst. Every U.S. recession was the result of a financial bubble bursting. Today, we have the housing crisis, in 2000 we had the dot com bubble bursting. Let us not forget the incompetent corporate leadership that handed out trillions of dollars of loans to people with bad credit. The U.S. has certainly had its fair share of incompetence over the past decade. Now with things crumbling, not only are the masses in fear, so are the corporations and government. The government is bailing out every incompetent person and corporations with hastily put together plans in hope it will stop the crisis from spiraling out of control. Good luck, because more government interference will more than likely make things worse. Now the American people are desperate and have hope in the Obama rhetoric of “Change”. Things could not have played out any better for Obama and the Democrats a month before the election. Remember these are the times when gifted orators such as Hitler and Stalin got into power. If you look at Obama’s record as a do nothing state or U.S. Senator, it is amazing how fear has everyone flocking to his mesmerizing, but substance lacking speeches. There is nothing ‘unique’ in his rhetoric. It is Jimmy Carter’s failed foreign policy and LBJ’s and FDR’s failed economic policies. If he wants to give every middle class person a 1000 dollar tax rebate, then why did he not ever propose such legislation over the last 10 years? The reason is because he is a liar and only telling the American people what you want to hear. This is the same thing Hitler and Stalin did in Germany and Russia during the Great Depression. When people are in crisis they lose the ability to reason rationally and to use commonsense when resolving problems. When people lose this ability they will cling to any message of hope. This is why people are flocking to Barack Obama rhetoric of hope. However, his rhetoric is nothing more than an empty message of hope.

If only everyone had some patience to let the economic situation play itself out. If only everyone had some commonsense and practical thoughts instead of letting fear get the best of us, we could come out of this a better country. Unfortunately, chaos is the rule of the day and Democrats will be taking over a lot of seats because we are just simply irrational in our behavior.