I was once optimistic that America could save itself by leveraging a return to the brilliant system designed by brilliant minds in the years following 1776 – but with each passing day, I get more and more pessimistic that the ship can be righted by those conventional means.

Liberty has become a commodity the productive pay government to be able to retain in small amounts. They are chained to government by the Quixotic notion that hard work and adherence to First Principles are still valued – even as more and more liberty is taken from them by a socialistic government and socialistic institutions (like a university that deigns to suspend a student and require reeducation for committing the thoughtcrime of stating ‪#‎alllivesmatter‬). The productive have most assuredly become the “forgotten man” of Yale University professor William Graham Sumner. He identified that person in an 1876 essay:

“As soon as A observes something which seems to him wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or, in better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X… What I want to do is to look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man. Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. He is the man who never is thought of…. I call him the forgotten man… He works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays…”

There is no escape for the non-productive either. In their ignorant attempt to balance the equation, they believe the liberties and tribute the productive pay to the government will be distributed to them – and some is – after the government skims off its vigorish for having to play the middleman. The non-productive pay their dues to government in the same manner as the productive – only they pay in a different currency. In exchange for the dole they receive, they pay for what they receive through ceding their liberty. Anyone who lives solely at the discretion of others (i.e. government) is never truly free.

Both classes are allowed doses of liberty in small amounts – as if they were were in a reverse drug rehabilitation program. We are weaned off liberty by having our daily ration cut by a cc per day over our entire lives as our dependence is correspondingly increased. At the end, we will only know liberty as that which we are allowed by government to do.

The winner in all of this is government. By withholding the bulk of liberty from the people, government limits their ability to object to its acts. That inability to object allows government (and those who operate its levers) to act in whatever manner it wishes – no matter what the citizens think. There can be no shame or remorse when standards are constantly redefined and accountability is a myth.

Today we are witnessing the forced coexistence of Marxism and capitalism, the product of a hundred years of Wilsonian “progressivism” capped off by an attempt by the Obama administration to combine two strands of DNA that are entirely incompatible. The result is a mutated society and economy, a creation as grotesque and unnatural as anything contemplated by the Doctor Frankenstein of author Mary Shelley. As a modern incarnation, Doctor Obamastein and his Igor like minions in Congress have constructed this modern version of “Frankenstein’s monster” from parts salvaged from the graveyard of dead ideas of people like Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx and attached them to a vibrant body born of de Tocqueville, Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Adam Smith.

As with Frankenstein’s creation, our current situation is an abomination and a crime against nature. It cannot exist in its current form. The incompatible DNA is beginning to express itself and will soon destroy the organism as a whole if we lack the will to remove the dead tissue. The conflict that is rampant in our society and economy has less to do with any individual program or policy than it does with the overall attempt to transform our society from one of believing in truths that are “self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” to one of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”.

There exist no two more incompatible beliefs than these.

We are nearing a tipping point. America has been on a knife’s edge for decades and I fear that balance is no longer sustainable. The statists and their acolytes will never voluntarily relinquish their power and position. They will most certainly block an Article V convention of the states by any means necessary. The power they hold will, in all likelihood, need to be taken from them.

Herb Stein’s Law applies:

“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”