Thoughts on a Snowy Day

It's snowing.  Has been since sometime during the night.  As I look out the window, I see the chickadees making runs to the birdfeeders, snatching seeds then flying off, to return again a minute later.

It's very quiet, not the sound of a motor anywhere.  A perfect day to stoke up the wood stove, curl up with a book, and let the world go by.  I watched the end of a movie this morning, Delhi 6.  Good movie, even though it was subtitled thoughout.  As I sit here in my quiet corner, I wonder how people can live in such teeming masses, all of humanity crowded next to each other.  Yet even as I say that, I'd love to go to India and experience it.  I'd like to experience life on many planes, but this one, the one I have today, is the one I want to always come back to: enveloped in quiet, surrounded by warm furry and feathered bodies:  cats, horses, goats, chickens, and anything wild that comes through on wings or feet.

I was reading The 5000 Year Leap, by W. Cleon Skousen, this morning.  Chapter 15 covered The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith, one of the foundations of our Founding Fathers' economic and political philosophy.  We've left that far behind.  For the first hundred years, America embraced Smith's ideas and the U.S.A. became the wealthiest nation in the world.  We produced the most goods, grew the most crops, and exported the greatest amount.  Real wealth, that's what America gave to the world, and though there was still poverty, it was not the glaring abject proverty that's seen all of the rest of the world.  Americans opened their hearts and their wallets and became possibly the most generous people in the world.

That's all changed now.  In the early 1900's, by slow degrees, free market capitalism began to fall into disfavor, as Marxism slowly encroached through the offices of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and almost every president since 1950.  What I find particularly telling an 1865 editorial by Lord Goschen in the London Times: 
"If this mischievous financial policy, which has its origin in North America, shall become endurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous without precedent in the history of the world. The brains, and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That country must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe." Hazard Circular - London Times 1865 (emphasis added)

Is it any wonder that our economy has been under attack, that the Constitution has been undermined, that the "dollar"--which used to be defined as 372.5 grains of fine silver--is almost worthless?  We're now fighting over the last 2 or 3 cents, and hyperinflation is breathing down our necks.