Welcome to caste, American style

“Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don't have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.”

“[...] if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu.”

“[This] surely increases the number of people dependent on the ruling class, and teaches Americans that satisfying that class is a surer way of making a living than producing goods and services that people want to buy.”

[Emphasis added.]

Angelo M. Codevilla in America's Ruling Class—And the Perils of Revolution

What this guy says is fundamental to an understanding of where we've come since beginning the Great American Experiment. We all yawned during Civics about this topic because it was so just a part of our past and present. However, few if any other nations in the history of this planet have ever enjoyed the personal and professional liberty American have enjoyed.

Other people (many of us and all we meet from other countries who believe themselves free under their respective political system) do not understand this because they've always lived with oppression. A person born without the physical advantage of another rarely grasps that advantage since each adapts his life to his circumstances.

We ourselves are apathetic to our plight re-adapting ourselves to enduring the requirements of the new, national identity driver's license, what we must do to get our vehicles inspected that is quickly making it impossible to drive older cars, especially ones slightly damaged in accidents, that we must corral together an array of proofs of citizenship each time we begin a new job.

These little encroachments are excused on making us somehow safer and on the fact that, taken each by itself, it's not that big a deal or frustration.

Read this article to understand how a ruling class emerges that turns the rest of a nation's citizenry into slaves. It has been the plight of every country in the world and is now assimilating the United States. It is natural entropy to sink to this level. It has never been the expectation of a people to live truly free under the rule of law and without the boot of oppressors exercising arbitrary, unrighteous dominion upon others.

And there is the insulting insinuation that somehow others could know better for us than we do. Pride is ever man's tempter. Pride to think he's better educated, more intelligent, has better ideas, and can solve other people's problems. Pride is what drove the inquisitor to burn others at the stake for their religious ideas; it is what encourages the atheist to think it's necessary to persecute God-fearers and believers at the point of a gun.

The Great American Experiment is just this: that no expectations are created upon people enjoying life, liberty and private property that are not reasonable and crucial. No laws infringing upon their liberty of action will be created that are other than utterly critical to the well being of the citizenry.

Obviously, you can say that it's crucial that everyone have medical insurance and be forced to pay for it. You can say that everyone should be forced to pay into a pot to support those people who can't pay for themselves.

But, you'd be wrong. You'd be creating rights where none exist. We have the natural right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. No human is born with any right to a job, medical care, guaranteed income or any certain standard of living. The fact that some teary-eyed liberal seizes the opportunity to get the state to pick some richer man's pockets to aid someone handicapped or worse, someone unwilling to lift a finger to help himself, does not create a magical right where none really exists.

It is right to help those who are in need. But it is a choice to do so.

And we put up with it. We debate, then embrace reluctantly all the burdens progressively imposed upon us by our rulers.

It's like a toad tossed into a pot of boiling water. He jumps back out immediately. Wilson and Roosevelt could not impost their ideas of ultimate social order on a people used to autonomy. Instead, they soaked us in a pot of cool water. FDR and every administration since has been turning up the heat a little each time. We lose the right to keep and bear arms. We endure limits to our right to assemble. Etc.

Obama arrives just a little early to impose his agenda of progressive socialism. It's rough on him, but he has faith that we've sunk this low. And I think he's right. I think we're going to get in line because he's done things in less than two years that would have gotten any other president impeached, then thrown into the pokey. We're screaming a little about the change in water temperature, but not too much. Things will go his way. He may even get re-elected.

Read here how this goes, then you can sit back and watch America become just another country in the world.

If you would like to understand how government is really supposed to operate in the United States of America, view this video illustrating a speech by a clear-seeing former United States Secretary of Agriculture.