Nobody likes rhetoric. Yet, the headlines yesterday seemed to either cover old territory or play up one mortal’s miscalculation or another’s. Followers of this blog are not apt to collect petition signatures for an undefined sense of healthcare reform based on the assumption that government, for a real change, will execute a program efficiently and honestly. It therefore might help to see that voices are joining those of the conservative think tanks crying in the wilderness. A letter to the editor of the Asheville Citizen-Times tried to illustrate one imperfection in the concept of government redistribution. It was followed by comments similarly adverse to the rapid socialization of America.
On July 15, economists made prognostications about the future of Asheville. Although the public might not get too excited about a hockey-stick graph with blurred out years at the bottom; at least the economists shared their opinion that the federal government was not curing the national economic woes by pouring oodles of dollars into overhead for government programs.
In another display of Americanism, one man at Bele Chere today wore a T-shirt that said, “Tyranny [I forgot].” It’s is very much like me to lose the punch line. However, the second word was some politically-correct homeland security jargon that meant something like “suppression.” I didn’t want to try to Google into the phrase lest I bog my sluggish computer down with spyware. The message, though, was a great reminder of what is perhaps the greatest threat to our way of life.