Agreed.
but
The continued redistrubution of wealth has failed miserably and has crushed the economy already. Trillions of $$ have gone to welfare programs and the "takers" class continues to grow each year.
The class envy tactics of the liberals is taking hold.
I agree as a person of liberal leanings (somewhat left of center), that our nation can only go so far down the road of entitlements before it collapses or greatly stifles innovation, entrepreneureal incentive, etc. However, it should be pointed out that people that retire are "entitled" to the money that was put away for them in the general account designated "Social Security" plus interest (at least equal to a compounding inflation rate). That is not a charitable contribution by the government - it's a entitlement in the form of a "I owe you", just as if the person put that money into a bank account. The problem is, people live longer now after retirement and other "entitlements" have increased.
When the US was young and businesses flourished in the past, it mostly lead to jobs in the US, so there was a direct correlation to incentive and innovation with our economic superiority and standard of living. Increasingly, companies now put their factories in lower cost economies (lower production costs often due to currency exchange rate, lower standard of living, and less entitlements). I know China does not want to be a net "importer" of goods, this would make currency manipulation almost impossible. It's almost impossible to wire US funds into the country and it is costly due to their currency control scheme. Companies normally must put their manufacturing plant in China and hire Chinese workers. This also supports their currency scheme while supporting their economy, since it would be too expensive for most Chinese to pay with internationally devalued yen to buy a car based upon US dollars and raw materials made in much more expensive regimes.
When we purchase/import inexpensive goods from China, it helps lower our inflation rate and gives us more buying power; however, it is a two sided blade and the other side of that reduces our demand for domestic workers. It's like an addiction, it seems to help us in one way, but then certainly hurts us in the end.
It also seems to me that as computers, robotic assembly and even "thinking" computers will in the near future almost eliminate the need for labor intensive "hands-on" manufacturing jobs of all kinds. We are moving more and more to jobs that have a lower profit scheme and demand fewer workers. Population on earth is increasing, jobs decreasing = global economic shrinkage and finally collapse. Computer technology will soon become too complex for the human mind to effectively manage or improve, so this task should be increasingly automated until eventually computers design and manage other computers and we become mostly obsolete in the entire economic system. Remember the news and talk about jobless recoveries during the past two upturns, the second worst than the first.
Anyway, the point is, we can't go back to our past and re-live our glory days as a nation. Times and the nature of the world has changed.
Whatever we do going forward, the equations for success have changed, the challenges are different, global competition is different, the power to destroy entire cities or even countries can now be in the hands of a terrorist, technology helps us be more productive, but productivity is simply another word for (less need for humans to work), people are less healthy now and require more medical care with less productive years as compared to total years lived due to a variety of factors, important resources (such as oil) are approaching depletion, world population is exceeding the earth's ability to process man's waste and decimation, etc, etc.
I'm not much of a historian, outside of my own history on earth, but it seems to me a political system that is built upon the idea of maintaining the status quo is no longer an advantage in our world. It used to be that great poliitcal unrest in other nations prevented investment in those countries, so our nations ability to maintain the status quo gave us a great advantage. In addition, the failed concept of communism evolved largely into a form of capitalism that now makes less "free" nations economically thrive. Now the status quo it is preventing us from making the important changes to adapt, maybe much of our nation of people will be soon sleeping in their cars, unemployed.
