The United States And The Road From Abundance To Bondage

“Is life in bondage better than death?” – The Ten Commandments

I heard Leftists can’t find tasty mushrooms:  someone said they lost their Morel compass.

Henning W. Prentis, Jr., presented a speech at the mid-year graduation of the University of Pennsylvania in 1943.  Mr. Prentis was the President of the Armstrong Cork Company.  Now, you might think that a cork company would only be of interest to the Swiss Army, but Armstrong was a different breed:  during World War II Mr. Prentis had Armstrong Cork making .50 caliber ammo, tips for warplane wings, sound insulation for submarines, and camouflage.

If your wife can fix a car, fix dinner, and then set a broken bone?  You have a Swiss Army Wife.

Eventually, several divisions were spun off, and it’s certain that you’ve walked on Armstrong Flooring and sat on furniture that was made by yet another Armstrong subsidiary underneath ceiling grids and ceiling tiles that were made by yet another Armstrong company.  All of this was started in a little Pennsylvania cork company way before Pennsylvania’s voting fraud made Kim Jong-un consider moving to Philadelphia.

Anyway, Mr. Prentis seemed to have an awful lot to say – his commencement speech clocked in at 4,953 words.  At 125 spoken words a minute, that’s nearly 40 minutes of straight talking, with zero memes or bikini graphs – looks like he didn’t know how to put a cork in it.  And all of those speeches were before the long lines of diplomas.

Graduation must have taken six days back then.  If you want to read the whole address, it’s here (LINK).

Mr. Henning Prentis’ essay has some very relevant content to today – I’ve posted just a few bits of it below.  I’ve fixed some punctuation, but the words are still Henning’s.  But I still haven’t found the answer to the most important question:  Who the heck names their kid Henning?

The historical cycle seems to be: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependency; and from dependency back to bondage once more.

At the stage between apathy and dependency, men always turn in fear to economic and political panaceas. New conditions, it is claimed, require new remedies. Under such circumstances, the competent citizen is certainly not a fool if he insists upon using the compass of history when forced to sail uncharted seas.

Usually, so-called new remedies are not new at all. Compulsory planned economy, for example, was tried by the Chinese some three millenniums ago, and by the Romans in the early centuries of the Christian era. It was applied in Germany, Italy and Russia long before the present war broke out.

Yet, it is being seriously advocated today as a solution of our economic problems in the United States. Its proponents confidently assert that government can successfully plan and control all major business activity in the nation, and still not interfere with our political freedom and our hard-won civil and religious liberties. The lessons of history all point in exactly the reverse direction.

Prentis’ quote can, thankfully, be summed up in a single chart that won’t take you 40 minutes to read:

Let’s not be like Russia circa 1917, okay? (Source for base: Wikimedia, CC-BY-SA-4.0, J4lambert)

In the United States, we were (mostly) blessed by abundance for decades at a time.  The Great Depression wasn’t the normal condition for the United States – it was an aberration of a fairly prosperous place.  But the Great Depression really was bad – Bob The Builder® was just called Bob then.

Inertia has a quality all of its own, but luck always helps.  After World War II, Europe was mostly devastated by the war.  Half of a decade of bombs and artillery shells and tanks and armies had killed millions, but also destroyed a majority of European and Asian governments plus much of the productive infrastructure.

America, meanwhile, had been untouched.  It had the oil, the steel mills, the agriculture, and the workforce.  It created consumer goods for itself and products for the world.  There was little competition.

Last time I bought land it was in Egypt.  Turns out I fell for a Pyramid scheme.

Oh, sure you could buy the Soviet version of Chevy Camaro® called the Lada Latitude©.  The Latitude™ was modeled on the Soviet T-34 Tank (500 horsepower diesel engine) that went zero to 32 mph in 45 seconds, and sported a stunning 1.17 miles per gallon in the base model.   It was also available with optional dual jet engines from a MiG-21.  Sadly those engines didn’t allow the tank to move, but did allow the wolf to blow down that pesky brick house, along with those capitalist swine.

There are many things you can call Soviet engineering.  Subtle is not one of them.

But post World War II gave the United States, and then, gradually the world, abundance, leading to selfishness.  Selfishness was probably best showcased in the 1970s and 1980s.  Tom Wolfe even titled the 1970s “The Me Decade.”  The 1980s followed suit – the pursuit of wealth was seen by many as the goal.  Morality?  The market (and leisure suits) were the definition of morality.

The 1980s bled into complacency, and finally into apathy.  The Grunge movement was a reaction to materialism.  What did it all mean?  What does any of this matter?  Pure apathy, so let’s not bathe and get a bunch of piercings and tattoos.

Now we are in a nation where citizens aren’t seeking freedom – they’re actively seeking dependence on the government – free money (guaranteed basic income), free healthcare (Medicare for all), and all manner of other support systems.  To quote one Mr. Harvard McClain (1950s?):  “If your government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away from you everything you have.”

Sure, I want everything for nothing from the State, but in every single time that’s been tried in human society, it always ends the same way – with the people becoming the enemy of the State.

And that’s how you get to Mr. Prentis’ last stage: bondage.

For a guy dealing with cork, Mr. Prentis has some pretty good vision.

Oh, and I don’t have to yell to get The Mrs. to come downstairs – she can hear a cork pop all the way across the house . . . .

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

34 thoughts on “The United States And The Road From Abundance To Bondage”

  1. I have come to the conclusion that we aren’t a people who deserve or can be trusted with freedom today. Our misplaced altruism has led to Idiocracy conditions and we really need a major winnowing in the herd.

    1. Freedom required discipline. Today freedom means, “Anything goes.”

      No the same. And, yup, altruism is a part of that.

  2. A year ago, literally nobody was wearing a mask.

    Today, nobody is literally wearing chains.

    2021 looms.

    https://bongino.com/elected-dnc-member-floats-re-education-camps-for-trump-supporters/

    Belly up to the bar for one last drink before crossing the line between weak men and hard times. Make mine Gentleman Jack, neat.

    https://www.westernjournal.com/ny-business-owner-tears-15000-covid-fine-live-tv/

    When we all finally meet at the reeducation camp, I claim a bottom bunk.

      1. The big difference between all of the prior collapses and the one that is coming is that to my knowledge none of those collapses included 434 million firearms in the hands of the private citizens. That is going to make the spiciness off the charts.

        1. I have no zeal for ‘blood in the streets’.
          None.

          But…
          Can you imagine — a north America with zero-zero-zero dope-fiends?
          No beggars blocking the entrance to the library?
          No child-molesters?
          No wets absorbing billions with a ‘B’ in welfare?
          Can you imagine — the instant termination of foreign aid?

          Can you imagine — a country with about a half-percent (.5%) of the current infestations of government agents?
          One dog-catcher instead of two-hundred?

          Can you easily imagine — no earthquake cars blasting slum-garbage from their stereo?

          Can you imagine — the Federal Reserve Bankers on their way to the gallows while still explaining their version of ‘economic theory’ to jurors?

          Can you imagine — a real old-fashioned hamburger with zero-zero-zero toe-foo filler?

          Can you imagine — no BATF-ags to register and tax your firearms mufflers?

          And the kicker:
          * Can you imagine — visiting frisco and District Of Columbia and Seattle and Los Angeles without needing an army and a convoy of Bradley Fighting Vehicles?

          4. Sign me up! I will miss my two Bradleys though… I named them humpety and dumpety…

        2. It’s fast approaching put up or STFU time for Americans. Hell. That time has long passed. All ya’ll fighting for now is to reclaim some honor.

          Sorry for the black pill. But WRSA is right. Nobody is coming to save you. Look at your opponents. They only beat us because we never fought back. Come on. The Police deployed SNIPERS against mothers protesting grown men in dresses accessing children in public libraries and NOBODY did a DAMN thing in response.

          All that it took for evil to prevail was that good men assumed someone else would do something

      2. Orlov pointed out that the preexisting disfunction of the Soviet Union actually helped people cope. Maybe the ‘Rona is giving us lessons?

      3. Just need to ask my wife about it. Then I can talk with her parents that lived 80 yrs of it and first hand accout of dekulakization. The slavic community is our ally.

  4. In a strange coincidence, I had some time today waiting for an appointment, and ended up downloading some texts from mises.org. I plan to while away the interim between the Socialist Takeover and the Rise of the Fed-Up with some quiet Kindle reading.
    After, I plan to open a school that explains – in REAL simple terms – what Freedom is about.

  5. This statement from Henry Prentis’s address made an impression:

    “It has long been recognized that education which does not mold the soul of man while it is fashioning his mind, is lethal poison for the individual, and social dynamite for the body politic.”

    Well… we are up to our eyeballs in social dynamite.

    1. Oops, the commencement speaker’s name is Henning. Brain and hands insisted upon a shortcut. I’m sure he was called Henry at some time in his life. Anyway…

      Our affairs assume that any “entitlements” become history probably through inflation. I’m already estimating we will lose our reserve currency status because in part of our unserious nature, and we will require a fixed currency of some sort.

      We also vote with long term interests of liberty in mind, not our short-term pocketbooks anymore. My belief is many are making that change. Of course, many are not.

      I believe it was Peter Turchin (yeah I like to review Zerohedge) who said that eventually the government goodies run out, then repression and force is required to maintain order. That probably explains how we get to the bondage cycle. Unfortunately though, the dictator is unlikely to be Dom DeLuise -> https://wilderwealthywise.com/american-caesar-coming-soon-to-a-country-near-you/

      1. That is one of the main drivers behind the Great Reset, creating conditions where people are more easily controlled via manipulation.

      2. This election is waking tons of people up.

        And I’m sure he was called Henry from time to time . . . !

  6. I have to congratulate you Mr Wilder, the most simplest and succinct explanation of the coming hardship apocalypse that is soon to be upon us I have read.

      1. We have to crank up the heat so the frog knows it’s being boiled.
        You have to make things much, much worse before they can begin to get better.”

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