I'm to the point where I think most don't have a clue what socialism even is. Or freedom for that matter.

it's not sudden. It's been over the last decade.
you are a technical entrepreneur- you should know this stuff!
http://www.moneynews.com/RobertWiedemer/...
did you get my husband's book on topic, cg? Consider it. Some things are now out of date, but many relevant arguments are laid out. He also discusses this extensively on his blog- www.hallingblog.com The link to his book is there.

I hope we're not that unusual. I hope most people really don't want socialism.

spot on. some of us, a minority apparently, think. We have to think.

"VCs now invest mostly in government backed projects or invest outside the US"
I'm interested in numbers on this. It's hard for me to tell b/c most of the high tech VC money goes to the West Coast. A little goes to the East Coast. The Midwest isn't on the VC radar. I have known a high-tech entrepreneur to move most of his company to the West Coast just for funding reasons. I haven not heard of the sudden dryup of funds, but it's hard to say b/c everyone looking for funding says it's hard. I'd be interested to hear the amounts of VC funding that dried up.

sad. ;(

"Michael Moore showing Bush in the Florida classroom on 9-11 was an example of that."
My engineering management class showed that clip. The professor believed that President Bush's delayed reaction is a normal human response to a situation you have not prepared for. If someone had told President Bush a _missile_ had hit buildings, he may have jumped up b/c that would have been easier to associate with something he had already thought about. My professor said this is a human trait, not peculiar to President Bush. The class had been discussing engineering decisions regarding bridges the fail and the infamous Ford Pinto case.

Moore was extremely unfair to President Bush. Moore is another example of the left/right shouting match that I reject.

"We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end."
Wow. Reading that again amazingly made me remember reading it over twenty years ago when I was 16 year old. It was a long forgotten memory.

Anyway, what does Orwell mean when he says "power". Power to do what? I understand he's saying it's for some utopian goal, but is it power get get products and services they want, power to get sex, power to get people acting like their friends, or a perverse thrill of being the gatekeeper controlling whether another human being gets what he wants?

hey Rob. "honest accounting." let's work backwards. So before SOX we did not have "honest accounting?" There is always fraud. This does not stop fraud. and that's been verified. We have had massive fraud less than 10 years later following the passage of the regulations. See Lehman Brothers, AIG, Fannie and Freddie. Basically the regulations and rules placed on a publicly held company are so onerous, conservative estimates are compliance with the law cost 3-4M per year for a medium sized company. In order to absorb these costs and make economic sense of them for your company, you need sales of about 500M. If the company can't go public, it takes the founders and VCs at least 10-20 years longer to get their money back. This kills the VC model. The number of companies going public after the passage of SOX is less than 20% of pre- SOX numbers. VCs now invest mostly in government backed projects or invest outside the US> The financial district in London proposed putting up a statue to Senators Sarbanes and Oxley because of all the business its passage shifted to GB. We are currently of all major countries, the ONLY country to have fewer public companies today than before SOX. Rob, if I may ask, what is your background? I want to see if you prove my point above.

I think once a society embraces the welfare state (social security/food stamps etc) the gullibility is obvious.
Getting something for nothing is extremely attractive and tempting to most.

Why are we different? Because we think.

On the contrary, Rob the people of Vermont by electing an openly socialist Senator have shown Thomas to be a prophet. It has taken eighty odd years but a majority of Americans including Vermonters have accepted the basic socialism concepts hook line and sinker.

There are many of us in the gulch who feel the same way. Welcome, ross. :)

And sad of sad, I have two grown children who are very successful economically and who I am unable to convince that their Individual Rights are disappearing rapidly.

What manner of psychology allowed these people to accurately predict the gullibility of we Americans? Why did some of us escape this gullibility even though we were trained in this subject by our parents, schools, and religions?

Ayn Rand was not the only one to observe the unmanaged human tendancy in some people.
From Part 3, Chapter 3 of 1984
‘The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?’-- George Orwell

One propaganda strategy used very much by the Left is to set the people up with just enough truth so that they lie to themselves. Michael Moore showing Bush in the Florida classroom on 9-11 was an example of that. The American Puppet Class shown Obama doing that after Iran nuked Israel would lie to themselves about the genius strategic planning by Carter 7.9 going on inside of the head who created the coming world "Man Caused Disaster" Years of indoctrination have created a very serious threat to individual sovereignty and liberty.

KGB defector, Yuri Bezmenov, 1985 interview describes the American Left voter of today - linked in my, The American Puppet Class blog post. This condition we see has been a long time coming and Ronald Reagan referenced Norman Thomas in his YouTube on socialized medicine. ‘‘You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism. We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy ...until you’ll fall like overripe fruit into our hands.’’ ~...~ Nikita Khrushchev ‘First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1953-1964’.

Thank you very much. I am looking for every way that I can to promote my blog, Compliance, which is the product of a doctor and my brother using input from others to guide discussions and thought about the direction of our country with a focus on healthcare. I did a lot of Face Book posts to groups, legislators and talkers as well as tweets to people of consequence with mid 30s page views. Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated. We have a country to preserve and I will die trying if that is what happens. My preference is to celebrate on the way through life because WE succeeded in shining the Light of TRUTH on Evil attacking US from within.
”A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.” -- Marcus Tullius Cicero

I agree on Hope and Change. I remember hearing someone working for Obama on a Sunday talking show saying "real change" over and over, not realizing that saying "real" without clarification actually weakened his words.

Regarding "socialism", socialists critics are the worst. People frequently say I'm for "socialism". If I didn't think the word meant "public ownership of the means of production" I might answer "yes", having been told that so many times. To me the word is like "terrorism". Those words are becoming general epithets for something bad.

Imprecision in the meaning of words is but one more tool in the socialist's arsenal. The fog is intentional. Remember "Hope and Change"? I believe it was intended to mean whatever the listener wanted it to mean.

I think B applies to me. Over-regulation also makes it harder to do business but not impossible - yet

Excellent blog. You should post it.

I have done two blog posts - The American Puppet Class which tracks how Russia went Communist & Ayn Rand left when she saw how that was going + Compliance = Death by 1000 Paper Cuts.
It is disheartening to see well intentioned, intelligent people so ignorant of that which they refuse to defend and even offer to give up willingly. “If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.” -- Samuel Adams
“The right to freedom being the gift of Almighty God, it is not in the power of man to alienate“If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.” -- Samuel Adams
“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.” -- Thomas Paine.
http://rossabh.wordpress.com/