Today is the 4th of July. Americans all over the country will be celebrating their independence from Great Britain. It is only proper and fit that they should do that.
Indeed, in the life of many countries around the world, one of the most important days of the year, if not the most important, is the anniversary of the date on which they became independent from some other power. It's always with sense of pride that those celebrations take place.
Yet, when I look around at the way some countries are governed today and the idiots that guide their destinies, I often wonder whether those countries wouldn't be better off being ruled by some other foreign power.
For, you see, once ideological dogma takes precedence over economic reality, you start skewing the market place in order to fulfil your utopia. Dislocations in the prices of all asset classes begin taking place. Direct taxes go up in the name of social justice. Once you no longer can increase those, because of popular resistance, you have to resort to indirect taxation and the creation of “crimes” on the statute book that yield ridiculously high fines. To enforce the fulfilment of your imaginative creations you have to enlist an ever ballooning army of otherwise useless bureaucrats that keep parasitically eating away at your budget. Suddenly you realise that your deficit has gone ballistic and that you have, first, to devalue your currency and, later, to take the bold step of printing huge piles of paper money that might just as well be drawn with crayons, the way people sneer at it.
While all this is going on, some of the people you govern may even experience an illusion of wealth. Finally, as you find it increasingly more difficult to hide the truth, you have to go war with some foreign country, so that you can properly justify the failure of your utopia. The very same one that on paper made a lot of sense.
All over the world, governments have become like cancerous growths that are suffocating their citizens and controlling every minute detail of their daily lives in a way one would believe only happened in science fiction. The distinction between public and private has become so blurred that individual liberty is today a mere vague concept in the mind of some long-dead Greek philosopher.
An American writer, whose work I read some thirty years ago and whose name, to my chagrin, escapes me now, defined a slave as a man who pays 100% tax. He went on to say that, if you paid 50% tax, you were half a slave. Well, in some countries, I'm afraid people are exceeding those barriers.
What would then you call the world we live in? Modern? I would call it post-medieval. And, if you remember that the whole of Roman economy was based on slavery, we may be heading that way.
So, ladies and gentlemen, forget your smartphones! Why don't you rise with me and let's all drink a toast to the dawn of our brave new world?
