Return To Liberty: Deep Thoughts On The 2008 American Election

I dare say, it's the most important election in the last 100 years.

I would respectfully submit that Ron Paul is the most rational choice. For all is not lost, and it is never too late for freedom.

By Citizen Correspondent Brandon Smith

Date Posted: 01/23/08

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2008 brings with it no paucity of challenges for America. The slowly revealing implications of integrating with a global economy (one ostensibly founded upon the American free-trade ethos), the ripple-effects of an unquenchable military budget requirement, the alienation generated from a tightening of civil liberties, and the very real threat of a permanent loss of global hegemony, represent a key point in American economic and political evolution.

America’s response to these challenges will define how it emerges in the next 50 to 100 years, whether it retains its prized hegemonic super power status, or slips into the fold of international plurality. The actions taken now will catalyze so many future geo-political events that even I, someone not taken to placing significance on any contemporary event, dare say that this is the most significant election in the last 100 years.

The net effect of all the critical inputs into the American economy and body politic at present is that there are ostensibly two courses of action – several actors with several different plans representing each. There is an acceptance or there is a rejection. Allow me to explain…

America is in an ever-increasing recession, one which has all the symptoms of turning into a full economic revolution. As industry gives way to technology whole sectors of the economy are shifting there geographic locus. This creates a great disturbance in local economies. Think of a mining town once the mine runs out of ore, or a manufacturing town once the product is technologically and/or socially obsolescent.

Whole sectors of America’s economy are falling prey to this evolutionary process. And America’s ethos of comparative advantage and global competitiveness has been the genesis of this. It’s important to avoid value judgments – globalism is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’; it simply is. Only actors are good and bad, not phenomena.

Governmental mismanagement exacerbates the unfortunate consequences of any phenomena. Good governance aggrandizes the positive. Take, for instance, our diminishing natural world. The expansion of the human species is a consequence of health standards, food standards, medicinal practices, infant mortality advances, etc. And yet, finding a place for all these robust little babies requires an expansion tantamount to the serial desertification of the entire planet.