2012 Will Be a Bad Year for Rats
Recently
by Karen Kwiatkowski: When
Progressives Attack!
It’s always
a gamble to make predictions. I’ve had the benefit of seeing the
2012 predictions of the greats, and so far they don’t bode well.
Marc Faber
is not excited about our prospects for prosperity. Chris
Mortenson and Gerald
Celente and Richard
Russell are also concerned. My sense is that 2012 will be a
year of learning, of realizing, of waking up. My predictions are
as follows:
2012 will
be a bad year for rats. Technocrats, bureaucrats, kleptocrats
and other central planners of the
superfamily Muroidae will be rightfully credited for the persistent
global economic and political malaise. People around the world will
ever more rapidly recognize – and dislike, disdain, and hold in
contempt – the ‘rats that plague us. Whether the tax-eating voles
of municipal governments, the hamsters and pouched rats of state
government, rattus norvegicus in D.C. or the New World Order
lemmings, members
of the ‘rat family will be increasingly viewed negatively. Ways
to avoid the ‘rat, to starve the ‘rat, disrupt the breeding cycle
and nest-building activities of the ‘rat, and to recover from ‘rat-bites
will dominate the airwaves and the Internet. ‘Rats themselves will
become more cautious and avoid publicity, while storing food and
attempting to reinforce their most important nesting and feeding
areas. Reports and viral videos of aggressive ‘rats will increase
in 2012, even as Americans and others successfully avoid and in
some cases, eliminate ‘rat centers of control.
2012 will
be a bad year for a good old-fashioned D.C.-devised war. As
governments everywhere go bankrupt, print money, and fail to deliver
the goods domestically, historians will justifiably predict war.
In previous eras, the wars associated with the collapse of empires
arrived as apocalyptic and mysterious surprises to the people. But
in 2012, the serfs have Internet. The young people are not loyal
to the nation-state, and often see politicians and state employees
as self-serving, arrogant, and parasitical. If educated by them,
they’ve learned to hold the state authorities in contempt. If educated
outside of the state, they’ve adopted a classical liberalism that
doesn’t trust or believe in central state apparatchiks. Of those
who do not fight our wars, the old are embarrassed at what has been
already wasted, and have lost enthusiasm for war. The middle-aged
are frightened and confused, feeling the financial pinch. It won’t
be easy to march to war with other countries, and even another Pearl
Harbor or 9/11 style event won’t be enough, not after what veterans
and citizens alike have learned from Washington’s failed and costly
occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
2012 will
be a year of progress towards truly free markets, sound money, and
government so small you can drown it in a bathtub. Knowledge
of and respect for liberty is growing. Every day, more Americans
understand how liberty functions in a society, and they embrace
self-ownership, sound money and limited government as working to
secure that liberty. Some of this knowledge comes through teachers
like Ron Paul, Tom Woods, Judge Napolitano, sites like Lewrockwell.com,
the Future of Freedom Foundation, and
the Foundation for Economic Education,
and hundreds of other organizations dedicated to classical liberalism,
free-market economics, limited or even no central government. The
impact of these people and organization is approaching critical
mass. But people are also learning naturally from their own experiences
in this long great depression of the 21st Century. Through
un- and under-employment, people are indeed rediscovering the value
of family, community, and neighbors. By increasingly dependence
on government largesse, contempt for the stupidity and arrogance
of the state is inculcated. Even financial dependence on government
jobs, so many of which are despised by the very occupants for a
thousand different reasons, breeds a kind of disgust for the state.
As governments at all levels begin to cut services and pass on costs
for past debt and spending to the taxpayers while bureaucrats continue
to spend the money of other’s and promote their own interests,
a force for freedom in the hearts of the people is nurtured. The
central government in the United States franticly accuses Americans
who prepare for reduced government, move outside of government influence,
reduce their tax burden, and withdraw from state number-crunching
systems to be “domestic terrorists.” Yet, for all that,
the central state will be the last to recognize the real changes
taking place, and will be unprepared for the energized and widespread
demand for liberty we will see in 2012.
2012 will
be hard on the political establishment. Establishment Republicans
and Democrats alike are discredited by their chosen ones who
seem to blankly echo the failed European statists. Americans
and voters of all ages are thrilling to Ron Paul’s message – a message
that rings back to the great anti-federalists of the Founding of
this country, and a message that rings true to our hearts, our faith,
and the natural law so many of us have rediscovered in only the
past fifteen or twenty years. The elections will be fun to watch,
to enjoy, and to challenge in every way we can. The establishment
candidates, whether Democrat or Republican statists, whether Romney
or Obama, or even the ambiguous statist Donald Trump, have become
aging pole dancers, naked political queens relying on equally aging
fans for a ever shrinking payout. In no way do I mean to offend
aging pole dancers with a loyal retinue. But politically speaking,
this establishment is going bankrupt, desperately looking for buyers
before the bank calls in the note.
2012 will
be fun. Americans are seeking alternative economic, social and
societal structures as we work through the government-caused investment,
war, educational, health care, and security-state bubbles. We will
increasingly, as a people, exercise our freedoms of speech, gun
ownership, movement, and property ownership in part as resistance,
and in part because we know the state really can do little to stop
us. This attitude will be seen at all levels of society, and it
will be exhibited by organizations, churches, businesses and even
lower levels of government. Municipalities will reject state mandates,
states will reject and even nullify federal mandates. Juries will
increasingly be unable to be seated, and those seated will increasingly
critique the state of government law, and nullify the stupidity.
If the so-called “99 percent” can demonstrate without
permission and designated free speech zone, certainly the Tea Party
and anti-government groups can do the same. The nature of fun usually
includes some healthy competition, some thinking in new ways, some
personal challenges and skill development, and a bit of risk-taking.
2012 will be a year of fun.
I’ve
been played it safe and spoken in generalities. To summarize my
five predictions for the coming year, let me share a specific local
story from a friend of a friend. A young man of 20, who happens
to be a Ron Paul supporter, on his way home from his job in a local
restaurant is stopped at a police “checkpoint” in our
small town. Without cause, the cop asks a lot of question, to which
the young man answers honestly. “No, I don’t have any drugs
or alcohol. I work and am driving home.” The cop, ignorantly
believing that the convoluted law he “enforces” resembles
the Constitution, states that [suddenly] he smells marijuana. The
car and the young man are thoroughly searched, and temporarily detained.
The cops eventually become bored, and the young man is released.
The next morning, his mother, who lives in another town, calls the
local police department and makes a vociferous complaint. The department
spokesperson said, “Yes, ma’am, of course we found drugs on
your son. Isn’t your boy the African-American kid?” 50 years
of civil rights flushed, stupidity and arrogance on display, and
white and black equally insulted by a state which seeks to divide
generations and races. We are made one in persecution, united in
a desire to own ourselves, our property, our time and our productivity,
and to live unobstructed by a grasping and lying state that no longer
serves or protects.
Leading edge
2012’ers will hold ‘rats and government lies and liars in full-blown
contempt. They will learn and practice liberty for themselves, their
families, and their communities in ways they tried in 2011, and
also in ways they never dared. They will laugh at the charades,
tirades and costumes of the writhing and twisting political establishment.
They will take risks that will lead to real change, and they will
find risk-taking not only liberating, but a fun and long-forgotten
part of the American tradition. So, in these ways, I part company
with the doomsayers, even as I believe every word they say, and
don’t dispute their data. For liberty and community, I think 2012
will be a very good year.
This originally
appeared on Freedom’s Phoenix’s
e-Zine.
January
9, 2012
LRC
columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send
her mail], a
retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty
and Power and The
Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles,
click
here or join her Facebook page. She
is currently running for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district.
Copyright ©
2012 Karen Kwiatkowski