It has been observed and known for centuries that political states exist on a foundation of popular consent. It does not matter what form the political state takes on and it does not matter if it is benign or tyrannical. No State can stand without the consent of the masses.

So why in America do we continue to submit to a central government that is making our lives miserable? Why do my friends and neighbors go along with darn near any idiotic dictate that comes from the fools running the political system? To stand alone against the entire system and yell “halt” is dangerous. Prison awaits those who do not “voluntarily” pay their taxes and businesses will be shut down if they don’t abide by the dictates of the rulers. But, still, the masses in the USA see the central government as legitimate at this time or the government would fall.

A joke told in the old Soviet Union was, “they pretend to pay us, so we pretend to work”. It was obvious that more and more Soviets had lost faith in the system and the fall came suddenly and without bloodshed when the final little shove pushed over the rotted edifice.

“I propose in the following discussion to call one’s own labor, and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others, the ‘economic means’ for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the ‘political means’.” — Franz Oppenheimer, The State.

Those who live off the “political means”, parasites all, know that generally people will not choose to abandon their system until they have little left to lose by doing so. The political class has a huge problem in that each individual greedy bastard is grabbing all he can get while promising his constituency all that they are demanding. Each politician’s power rests on the wealth extracted from citizens and showered on campaign contributors, often large corporations or NPOs, with a little bread and circuses tossed to the constituents to maintain their misguided belief that they benefit from the current system.

Each election cycle requires new political promises of government money, favoritism and protection to the jostling factions of campaign contributors, industry segments, the permanent bureaucracy, and constituents. Each year satisfying all these factions takes more and more wealth away from those that produce wealth. We are choking the founders of the feast. Each year we extract more wealth from members of society at large.

There are many ways that the political class extracts wealth from the society at large: taxes, borrowing, printing money at the Fed, Cronyism for insiders and favorites, and other rewards for the rent-seekers. This teaches society at large a subtle but unmistakable lesson: people who produce wealth are chumps. We see that the real power goes to those who pick producers’ pockets and that lesson is manifestly clear to the young. Generation by generation we have become more “takers” rather than producers.

Each politician obviously tries to maximize his power to control the lives of others by channeling huge amounts of extracted wealth through his office to campaign contributors and constituents. But as a group the politicians have destroyed the wealth generation machine that built the great American economy that we used to enjoy and delivered the most indebted society ever to exist on planet Earth.

So how do we get out of this mess? That’s unlikely to happen. It has been said that men go mad in groups but recover their senses only as individuals. We will continue our slide toward a much lower standard of living; one where even brainwashed believers in our political system will have nothing left to lose by abandoning their faith in the State. At that point, a USSR moment will occur.

The fall of the USA appears to now be inevitable.