Mind games of conservatives and liberals

One can't remember the past they came from, the other can't figure out the future they're creating despite all the evidence of what's happened in other countries.

If it's one thing that frustrates me about conservatives and Republicans it's their thinking that we used to inhabit some sort of capitalistic, entrepreneurial, free market paradise. We never did and never will. When I hear my peers who've been sucking on the Medicare teat for years, moaning about socialized medicine I'm just gob smacked.

I received a good K-12 education, a bachelor's and master's degree in tax supported institutions. The U.S. and Illinois government and my local town fathers didn't do that to be kind and benign. They figured I was a good bet and would return the favor with more taxes for them. I had pure water, vaccinations, and safe (modified with vitamins and minerals) food courtesy of the government's public health and agriculture programs. The townspeople in the little towns where I lived taxed themselves for the good of the entire community, even those who couldn't pay. Before I was born my blind grandmother got a "pension" which sometimes fed the family.

Even I know who built our interstates and why--I was around then. I know that the biggest recipient of government welfare over the years is agriculture and that I benefit from those prices every time I go to the store (even though I've paid up front through my taxes). Even I know the federal government has been tinkering with the housing market since the great land rushes of the 19th century. I never had a VA or FHA insured loan, but I certainly knew Republicans who did, and I always had a break on my taxes in the days I still had a mortgage. My dad didn't use the GI Bill, going right back to work when he got out of the Marines in 1945, but millions of men bettered themselves on the government's dollar as a pay back for the risks they took, going from farm boy and mechanic to doctor and lawyer. My husband brought home the bacon many times on pork construction projects funded by the U.S. or a state or a local government. My career was in academe--can't get much more government dependent than that!

Even I know that when you do favors for the government, it repays you in kind. My ancestors, who were pacifists and didn't bear arms, supplied the fledgling American government food stuffs (probably would have been taken from them if they hadn't) during the Revolution and were rewarded with land in Ohio before it was a state. One of my ancestors, Michael Danner, was the King's Commissioner of Highways in the colonies and helped to lay out the famous Monocacy Trail; I'm guessing that led to some pretty good perks and he moved on up when Pennsylvania became a state. The same guys who were given land to build the canal system to open up the Midwest to commerce and transportation got to also destroy it for the benefit of railroads, with state and federal favors and help.

But as naive as conservatives seem to be, that's not as frustrating as the blindness of progressive/socialists and Democrats who don't seem to be able to read history. They don't believe that what happened in Nazi Germany (state controls the business owners and uses the proceeds for war), the Soviet Union (state owns business, labor and agriculture and creates famines and misery) and Red China (state murders its own citizens to achieve its economic goals) can happen here--because they're too smart.

The health care take over (don't call that 2,000 page bill a reform), the energy scam under the guise of saving the planet, the holier than thou diversity and multicultural blather that is really about losing our free speech and creating globalism. The huge fortunes that were amassed in energy, commerce and transportation in the 19th and 20th century built with government help were just Al Gore and George Soros doing business today with the phony CO2 credits and cap and trade. It's just harder to see since there's nothing tanglible. There's no there there. Gore's become a millionaire many times over by just doing what Americans have always done--using the government to build their fortune. That is capitalism, American style, dressed up to save the world.

Really, progressives/marxists/democrats are smart people who have lost all sense of both history and the future. Despite all the gun laws they've put in place, they are willing to put a loaded gun to their head and blow out what's left of their brains. Which wasn't much.