All that's needed for evil to succeed...

I've been hearing a quote a lot recently:

All that's needed for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.

This sounds great at first glance, but the problem is that pretty much everybody thinks that they're on the good side. Osama bin Laden thinks that he's on the side of good against a great evil that's rising in the west. Hitler thought that he was on the side of good by unleashing the genetically superior german race and allowing it to rightfully supplant the rest of humanity. Rush Limbaugh thinks that he's on the side of good against a bunch of yellow liberals trying to weaken this great Nation. On a practical side, how do you know if you're on the side of right? As far as I'm concerned, this quote is just a shallow attempt to justify vigilanteism. As far as I'm concerned, "good men" doing something is pretty much the root of all evil in this world.

Getting rid of welfare

I discovered a new website today:

http://www.issues2000.org/Background_Budget_+_Economy.htm

It reports that we spend 405 billion dollars on welfare each year, more than any other category, and almost twice what we spend on the military. Welfare was a good idea when it was first devised, but too many people take advantage of it. I'm afraid people just aren't deserving of it. This same web site reports the National Debt as being 5.5 trillion dollars. If we were to take the money we now spend on welfare and apply it to paying off the national debt, we could have the debt payed off in less than 16 years (assuming an otherwize balanced budget). We're paying 215 billion per year just to pay interest on the National Debt. If the debt were gone, we could then either lower taxes or apply the 215 billion we're now spending on interest on other things, like the military or space exploration, or any number of other programs, just not on more welfare.

- LeRoy.

The Death of a Nation

I don't know if anyone's noticed this or not, but every great nation that's existed in the past before this one has eventually fallen. Sure, maybe it's just that we've gotten better at designing governments, and each one gets more and more stable until we get one that lasts forever, but I'm thinking that that's not the case. I think there are a handful of reasons why nations collapse, and I don't see this one doing anything different.

1) The number one reason that nations collapse, and this is really two reasons that feed on each other, is that a) as time goes on, people get more and more sophisticated in terms of their understanding of how the nation works, and they find ways to manipulate the system to their benefit, and b) because the nation is so powerful, they assume that it's invincible, and they begin to focus their attention away from what's best for the nation, and more toward what's best for a particular sub-group of the nation that they belong to. An example of this is the partisan politics that we have in the nation today. Of course, we've always had political parties, but if my theory is correct, votes in Congress should fall more and more on party lines as time goes on. I'm not going to actually take the time to verify if this is the case, but if someone else wants to, I'd be very interested in the results.

2) The second biggest reason that nations eventually collapse is that people are constantly trying to figure out ways of getting more than what they have. I'm not talking about just wealth here, but quality of life and security. This is especially true after a nation has gone through a great growth spurt. People are used to the idea of things getting better and better, and they are unwilling to give up that idea when the growth spurt ends. Instead, they continue to believe that they should be getting more than whatever they had before. This sense of entitlement causes them to shun doing menial labor or to fight battles to protect what they have. Instead, they hire illegal aliens to do the "jobs that no one else wants to do", and although the poorer members of society will join the military, even they get upset if a tour of duty lasts too long. I've just been reading up on the Golden Horde of Ghenghis Khan. When his men went on a "tour of duty", they pretty much stayed on that tour of duty for the rest of their lives. They didn't go home again. Our boys are suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome after only a few years of war. Of course, we don't let our boys blow off steam by raping and pilaging the countryside either, so that could be a contributing factor as well.

3) This one may be a little controversial, but successful societies don't have the same pressure of natural selection as less successful societies. Each generation has it's share of misfits and weaklings. In less successful societies, fewer of these people make it to adulthood and pass their genes on to the next generation. In successfull societies, most of these people live and prosper, at least well enough to pass their genes on to the next generation. Each generation then gets a little weaker, both physically and mentally. Sure, they still produce people that are both mentally and physically strong, but their percentage of the total population becomes less and less with each generation.

- LeRoy