The Fruits Of Ignorance

Monty Pelerin * EconomicNoise.com

Mass ignorance was referenced tangentially in the previous post regarding the media and Benghazi. It is what enables the political class to gain advantage and then utilize a captive or at least compliant media to cement their position.

Ignorance is what made an Obama possible. It is also what ensures that his successors will be worse.

The extent and implications of dealing with ignorance are dealt with by Jim Quinn in his latest article. The clear beneficiary of this ignorance is the political class:

The kabuki theater that passes for governance in Washington D.C. reveals the profound level of ignorance shrouding this Empire of Debt in its prolonged death throes. Ignorance of facts; ignorance of math; ignorance of history; ignorance of reality; and ignorance of how ignorant we’ve become as a nation, have set us up for an epic fall. It’s almost as if we relish wallowing in our ignorance like a fat lazy sow in a mud hole. The lords of the manor are able to retain their power, control and huge ill-gotten riches because the government educated serfs are too ignorant to recognize the self-evident contradictions in the propaganda they are inundated with by state controlled media on a daily basis.

Whether this state of ignorance was envisioned and planned is moot, but government control of the education system made it possible:

The toxic combination of government delivered public education, dumbed down socially engineered curriculum, taught by uninspired intellectually average union controlled teachers, to distracted, unmotivated, latchkey kids, has produced a generation of young people ignorant about history, basic mathematical concepts, and the ability or interest to read and write. They have been taught to feel rather than think critically. They have been programmed to believe rather than question and explore. Slogans and memes have replaced knowledge and understanding.

The beneficiaries of all this ignorance has been the political class. They have been able to make promises that cannot possibly be met as a means to add to their own personal power and wealth. Mr. Quinn provides a short list of the realities the country is unable or unwilling to grasp:

• It took 192 years for the country to accumulate $1 trillion in debt. It has taken us 30 years to accumulate the next $16 trillion of debt. We now add $1 trillion of debt per year.

• If the Federal government was required to use GAAP accounting, the annual deficit would amount to $6.7 trillion per year.

• The fiscal gap of unfunded future liabilities for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and government pensions is $200 trillion.

• Using realistic growth assumptions adds another $6 trillion of state and local government unfunded pension benefits to the equation.

• The Federal government has increased their annual spending from $1.8 trillion during Bill Clinton’s last year in office to $3.8 trillion today, a 110% increase. The population has increased by 12% over that same time frame, and real GDP has advanced by 25% since 2000.

  continue article at EconomicNoise.com:

  http://www.economicnoise.com/2013/10/28/fruits-ignorance/