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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (25194)	9/8/2009 7:18:13 PM
From: Maurice Winn	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36918

It takes time for bludger OPM mentality to take over: <Was/is this attitude toward OPM a recent phenomenon?> Decades ago, my mother told me how her father said when the Labour Party welfare state ideology originally won in the 1930s, "Well, that's the beginning of the end", or words to that effect. She was politically opposed to his thinking and was "modern" and in favour of socialism, government and so on. As was I in my ignorant youth. We thought he obviously didn't understand how the modern world should be. Having been brought up to work, my parent's generation all worked all their lives and welfare was for those at the bottom of the heap who couldn't cope for one reason or another. My generation was also brought up to work, but without the Great Depression and World War I and World War II rationing and disasters looming large in their lives though the shadow was reflected in the way we lived, so we worked too. But bludger mentality started to creep in with belief in government endemic, with socialism, licensing, capital controls and other controls growing like topsy, and accelerating. In the 1970s, the number of unemployed was a couple of thousand. By the end of the 1980s, the bludgers were numbered in the 100,000s and growing. Regulations grew, government departments expanded, welfare opportunities increased. Benefits became multigenerational ways of life. Beneficiaries became "customers" of the welfare agencies. Now, all of the WWI, Great Depression, and WWII people have died, or near enough to it. The Baby Boomers are on their way out. Socialist welfarism is now the norm. Government "jobs" are standard. The rest of us feed the empire and their welfare supporters. The total number of people who are now largely dependent on cash flow from government coffers must be about 70% of the population. Maybe more. Roading contractors for example are privately owned companies but get their money from the government. Crown owned corporations are theoretically run like businesses, but they are not. It's doubtful that those people will vote for LESS money going out from the government. Since few of them have the slightest understanding of economics, it's unlikely that they'll vote for less. Especially when they really do think they are doing a great job and they could do even better if they could just get some more "resources" aka OPM from the government and more regulations to force people to go along with what they want to do. The CO2 nonsense is part of the deal. Almost nobody has any understanding of the process. They kind of wave their hands and say it's the CO2 absorbing the light from the sun and acting like a blanket. They think that's about it. It sort of makes sense to them so they figure it must be true since "experts" and the government and everyone else is saying it too. Not many people are willing to stand apart from the crowd, especially when they don't really understand what's going on. So they all shout Sieg Heil and start goose stepping too. They think there's safety in numbers. And there is, for the most part, until the lemmings arrive at the cliff edge, or the train pulls up at Auschwitz... then it's too late to be an individual. In another 20 years, the Baby Boomers are going to get a shock when the immigrant Chinese, Indians, Iraqis, Russians, South Africans and others and their descendants decide that the welfare state has run its course and taxes are too high and it's time to cut back and that families should take responsibility for their own. They will vote to cancel the welfare state and run the place the way they run China, India, Iraq, etc... where there is not much in the way of welfare for lazy spendthrift Baby Boomers who didn't take the trouble to provide for themselves. Nor for layabout Maoris and others who learned that the world owes them a living for the simple reason that they are alive and want things. Mqurice