Sure, I'm upset as I suspect quite a few people are. The federal government is now lurching toward socialism at warp speed. I am not aware of ANY socialized society in which the people fared very well. You can look at the darkness of North Korea as prime example of the general widespread poverty of the people socialism brings with it. Or consider the failed state of the USSR.

Here is the text of an email I sent to our senators in Washington recently:

Dear Senator,

Why should we trust you folks in Washington to fix the mess this country is in? After all, the mess we have was caused by you and your ilk because of your ridiculous laws that so severely hamper the economy. I am talking about those laws which interfere with a free economy. Something which we do not have!

Did you ever hear of the term “laissez-faire”? I doubt it. It comes from the French and means “hands off.” But, no, you people persist in trying to micro-manage everyone’s financial affairs with such laws that set prices and seemingly arbitrary conditions upon contracts between individuals.

For instance, consider the minimum wage. If person A wishes to work for person (or firm) B for $3 per hour you do not permit it. You insist that it must be at least $6.55 per hour when the work is not done for you, nor are you paying for it! Talk about interference!

You insist that a bank must loan money to an individual whose credit reports indicate that the loan will probably not be repaid. Shame on you! Telling the banker he must give away money! No wonder that the banker instead chooses to loan to no one. I’d do the same in his shoes – get out of the business rather than attempt to run a business at which I will surely lose money.

Go back and reread the history of this nation; of the first attempts to practice socialism on this continent by the early settlers. The Virginia Company and Jamestown experience and other socialistic societies such as North Korea today are miserable failures. You forget that if a man does not profit from his labor, he will not labor at all. So you will have us support him! Shame on you! Surely the means of support will vanish.

Throw away your Karl Marx and read Adam Smith instead. I find the commentators here and in Europe who say this is “a failure of capitalism” objectionable. No this is a failure of our socialism.

Regards,
A concerned citizen

Prediction: We are about to experience a decade as miserable as the 1930s. Why do I say this? Because Hoover's Smoot-Hawley tarriff exported the US recession to our trading partners who recovered much more quickly because their governments were not as activist as ours was with all of Roosevelt's alphabet soup programs, and Obama appears to be as meddlesome as was Roosevelt.