If you’ve ever traveled the world, you’re pretty aware that there are many places where hot showers are not standard or common. These places should be banned from existence. Oh. Haha…I’m just kidding. Kind of.
One of my favorite things on earth are hot showers. I literally thank God every single day I step into one. No matter where I am.
When I was young and would visit my extended family in Malaysia, there were times that we were hosted by our relatives in their homes rather than stay in a hotel. Staying in their homes was traumatic for me. Why? They didn’t have hot showers! Well, according to me, they didn’t. According to them, they did. They didn’t even have real showers. What they had were bathrooms with a shower head in the middle of the wall and a drain somewhere in the floor of the room.
So taking a shower involved completely soaking my toiletry bag, which I kept forgetting to put out in the hallway, the bathroom sink, the toilet, the roll of toilet paper, the toothpaste and toothbrushes, and anything else that happened to be in the bathroom at the time. And even though Malaysia is very hot, I wanted a warm shower. Not one of my showers ever got warmer than luke warm. And even luke warm was rare.
The Success of a Free Market Economy
The economic freedom of America is the reason most of us in the U.S. can enjoy hot showers today without even thinking about it. The free market economy that the Founding Fathers set us up with helped us have the greatest advancements in technologies and innovations that the world had ever seen. That included having air conditioning, electricity, cars, elevators, hot showers, and other luxuries for the masses rather than just the wealthy elite enjoying them, like in Europe and Asia.
During America’s founding, the Founding Fathers had wise views about the economy using natural laws in the marketplace instead of government laws. One of the greatest books of all time, called The Wealth of Nations, written by a Scottish college professor, Adam Smith, fit into their thinking perfectly. So, “the United States was the first people to undertake the structuring of a whole, national economy on the basis of natural law and the free market concept described by Adam Smith…
…By 1905 the United States had become the richest industrial nation in the world. [Got that? The richest industrial nation in the world.] With only five percent of the earth’s continental land area and merely six percent of the world’s population, the American people were producing over half of almost everything — clothes, food, houses, transportation, communications, even luxuries.” * That is the great tribute and proof of the free market system.
The Founders knew that “the greatest threat to economic prosperity is the arbitrary intervention of the government into the economic affairs of private business and the buying public. Historically, this has usually involved fixing prices, fixing wages, controlling production, controlling distribution, granting monopolies, or subsidizing certain products.” ** Wow. That just described Obama…AND Bush…AND Clinton….and… you get the picture .
Our Standard of Living is In a Death Spiral!
The free market, capitalistic system that brought so much prosperity and elevated our standard of living to levels never before seen in the world has practically become extinct. Politicians, like our good old President Obama, make laws and regulations every day that kill our economic freedoms and bring us further and further away from America’s original successes.
Not only do politicians create job killing, business murdering, legislation but America’s politicians are on a mission to spend the United States of America right into a ‘debt grave’. America has gone from being the largest creditor in the world to becoming the largest debtor nation in the world, thanks to politicians and administrations like President Obama’s and President Bush’s.
America’s Debt has Broken All World Records for Debt
Monstrous debt and strangulating regulations are the reasons for our declining standard of living here in America. Our government wanting more power and control has led to the debt and regulations. Our Founding Fathers understood, the more freedom (power and control) a government has, the more its people are impoverished and in chains. BUT the more freedom the People have, the more the government is in chains with limited powers. As it should be.
For the last few decades we have borrowed ourselves into prosperity. All these big houses, big SUVs, iPads, and consumer stuft we all own is due to our government borrowing and borrowing and borrowing. And failing to save. The money Americans have been using the last couple of decades is just money that has been printed up by our Federal Reserve. We haven’t earned it by making or manufacturing goods and then selling them. We’ve been getting a free ride from the Federal Reserve printing up dollars and putting it into the system. But there is a terrible consequence associated with just printing up money out of nothing.
Printing money out of thin air, also known as ‘inflation’ devalues our Dollar
Debt and printing money are part of the same equation. Printing money in your basement is known as counterfeiting; because it’s not real money backed by anything of real value. The Federal Reserve is essentially doing the same thing. They are counterfeiting dollars. These new dollars they print up (or type into a computer) are not backed by anything of real value. They aren’t backed by goods or services that Americans make. They aren’t backed by gold or silver. They aren’t backed by anything. They just print them (in a complicated way, of course, using treasuries).
We are addicted to borrowing the Fed’s printed up dollars for cheap, at practically zero interest rates.
They print it. We borrow it at super low interest rates. That’s what caused the housing bubble.
It won’t be easy to reverse this. Actually, we can’t reverse this. We just have to stop. Stop borrowing. Stop voting for politicians who promise us things that are not theirs to promise us. Stop out of control government spending. Stop allowing government to shackle us and our freedoms. I’d love it if we could take back our freedoms and shackle the government’s powers back to what the Constitution laid out.
The Only Solution to Bringing Back National Prosperity is to Bring Back Economic Freedom
In order for America to see a strong economy again, we can’t keep printing money. We can’t keep borrowing from other countries like China and Japan. We can’t let the government continue to attempt to “create jobs.” Government can’t create jobs. Only businesses can create jobs. The best thing government can do regarding jobs is to get out of the way; stop imposing huge regulations, taxes, and fees on business owners and let them do their thing to create jobs.
It’s going to hurt if we do the right thing. We are used to borrowing money (hello, credit cards!) to buy stuff. We do not save and wait to buy the things we want. Americans will have to start doing that again. We have gotten used to the government lending us money for our homes at a cheap interest rate. That all stops if we do the right thing. But government has to do the right thing too. They have to stop printing money.
Be prepared. If they stop printing all that money (which they won’t), life will get really hard. For awhile. But then it will get better. We have economic cycles, like we have seasonal cycles. Winter will eventually turn into spring.
If we don’t stop these actions on our terms, they will eventually stop on nature’s terms. We’ll be another Greek tragedy.
Greece’s economy collapsed because they had borrowed too much and their creditors stopped having faith that they would be able to pay it back. So other countries stopped lending to Greece. And they collapsed.They refused to cut back on govenrment spending. America is in the same boat as Greece. Our creditors just haven’t given up on us. Yet. Many still think that America is solvent and will pay back its debts. Unfortunately, they are mistaken. The debt is just too big. And the world will one day realize this and stop lending.
Let’s bring our great nation back to being economically strong by lessening the amount that government involves itself in our economy. Vote for politicians and congress members who want to shrink government and reduce regulations on businesses. Watch out for politicians who want to put more strangle-holds on businesses or who want to give certain businesses unfair advantages.
Our hot showers depend on it!
*The Five Thousand Year Leap – W. Cleon Skousen pg.132
**The Five Thousand Year Leap – W. Cleon Skousen pg.132
