Too little, too late

Many of us who opposed Barack Obama’s candidacy for president of the United States did so because we did not want to turn America into a socialist country. Yours truly included.
Unfortunately, our grievances with socialism have been too little, too late. The United States of America has gradually gone all but socialist in its infrastructure and operations since President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal came into being 75 years ago.
Today America is a republican democracy in name and presentation only. The dynamics and mechanics of the federal government clearly function as socialism.
Washington, D.C., runs everything that the individual states are capable of and ought to be handling independently. At least that’s how our republican democracy used to and is supposed to work.
Just look at the infrastructure of the federal government today. It dictates policy on every imaginable industry and element of society: From education to health care, insurance to banking, housing to human services, food safety to agriculture, from labor to the environment, consumer protection, and so on. All of these used to be managed by the states. The federal government merely served as the intermediary in disputes.
Not any more.
Now the United States government dictates and enforces everything. And the states, once a collection of independent governments under the same constitutional law of the land, have become subjects to one centralized power. All fifty of them, in fact, stand in line with their hands out, waiting for their stipends—also known as subsidies. Not unlike the lines of people in Moscow waiting to get their daily rations under the iron fist of the Soviet Union.
But this is only half of the story.
The U.S. government has taken another giant step backward toward official socialism by bailing out the financial industry. Our esteemed leaders have said that such action was necessary to avoid collapse and catastrophe. But the consequence has been that now other industries are lining up with their hands out. Heck, even individual states, counties and municipalities have resorted to begging from Uncle Sam to give them money.
If this trend continues, then the federal government will have invested itself into every major American industry and company therein. It will effectively become the majority stakeholder and have the right to make decisions autonomously.
Can you see just how close we are coming to being state-run and state-owned? Dangerously close.
And frankly, the longer this recession lasts, the closer we will continue to get. It may only be a matter of time before the federal government is the end all, be all of American business and industry. If or when that day comes, then we might as well hold a funeral service for free market capitalism and republican democracy and bury them permanently, because there will be no turning back at that point. Once the state has control of the money it will also have all the power.
One thing that is as sure as death and taxes is that once Uncle Sam gets his sticky fingers into something, he never, ever lets go. In fact, he keeps grabbing for more. FDR’s New Deal is a perfect example. President Roosevelt intended his reforms to be only temporary, short-term solutions meant to address immediate problems. Once the economy stabilized and the Depression declared over, then the New Deal programs were supposed to go away and America would return back to normal.
But a great many of the programs established by the New Deal are still in existence today. In fact, they have grown enormously bigger since their inception.
So, I would not expect the fed to simply relinquish control over the industries it bails out when the crisis has passed. Rather, I expect this control to continue and, in fact, metastasize like a cancer.
All of us who have been so vocal against socialism during this last presidential campaign ought to be ashamed of ourselves. We had plenty of chances in the last 75 years to put an end to this procession toward state collectivism. But instead we chose to sit on our thumbs and complain about it.
Consequently, the gradual shift to the left and toward socialism has picked up so much steam that nothing short of an outright revolution can stop it. Now I fear we may be too late to do anything short of declaring open rebellion to halt the final advance.
We know what the Civil War did to this country. God help us if we have given ourselves no other alternative.