Remember when you were a kid and you and your friends would go out and toss around the old pigskin? Then along came the Nerf football? They were softer and squishy; a lot easier to handle and a lot more forgiving than the harder, antiquated leather version of the football right?
Remember when you were a kid and you and your friends would go out and toss around the old pigskin? Then along came the Nerf football? They were softer and squishy; a lot easier to handle and a lot more forgiving than the harder, antiquated leather version of the football right? Since that time, Nerf has made a fortune converting other items from their original version to these kinder and gentler forms as well. Today there are Nerf soccer balls, Nerf swords and even Nerf guns. This popularity of these items has lead to the term “nerf” being used to represent a weakening of something. Online gamers, for example, use the term “nerf” freely whenever their characters get an adjustment from game developers once the players are determined to be too powerful by the powers that be.
Now something else is being nerfed; the engine of our economy
For years we have had foisted upon us a mixture of capitalism and socialism. The socialists accepted this as inevitable because they needed the power of capitalism to keep necrosis of Socialism afloat. That is how powerful capitalism is believe it or not. If you doubt this, just look Hugo Chavez. This is a man who is constantly blaming the capitalists in the United States for preventing his socialist utopia from properly forming. Given that knowledge there can be no doubt as to which is more powerful?
Without the power of entrepreneurship, liberty and capitalism to bolster it, history is replete with examples of socialist societies that have failed and collapsed into dysfunctional heaps under their own weight. So the socialists here in the States decided that keeping just enough capitalism and free market principles alive was the best way for them to get many of their own socialist ideas implemented and funded.
Do you doubt this as well? If you do then explain how wealth redistribution scams like Welfare, Social Security, Medicare, Food Stamps, etc. have been funded over the years. They were not funded by socialism. The dollars to keep them chugging along were not harvested from the magical money tree Congress keeps behind the Capitol either. Oh no, these programs have all been funded by people finding nooks and crannies of freedom among the bureaucracy, eking out a living, pursuing their own liberty, working to better themselves and paying ransom to the government for the privilege of being left partially alone and the hope that future generations would do the same in numbers sufficient enough to pay down any current shortfalls caused by socialism.
Well, now it is time for socialism to begin gobbling up the last vestiges of capitalism and freedom. There is no other choice because socialism has expanded as far as it can without doing so. We have been for the past couple decades essentially nerfing the last vestiges of capitalism to create a new status quo; Nerfitalism.
Nerfitalism is socialized capitalism and the final stage of socialism consuming what it has used to sustain itself. We are now slowly being stripped of every last bit of responsibility we once enjoyed. When you fail in your formerly capitalist endeavors, the government will bail you out. If you are poor you will be helped under the auspices that someone else caused you to fail in life. If you are rich you will be helped under the claims that you are too big to fail. Our fearless leaders are trying to lessen the pain that comes with freedom and working to remove the risk of failure because freedom is just too hard for some people. Since capitalism is such a minor part of our current state, even though it is without a doubt still the powerful engine that keeps the state running, they conclude that it is time to start bringing in the last few capitalists to the fold like a body beginning to consume its fat reserves when all other food has run out.
POOF! We have been nerfed. Falls no longer hurt. Bad decisions no longer cost us. Idiocy is treated as normalcy. Failure to plan for your future will not be a source of ridicule.
And all it took was the federal government to make it so. Isn’t it wonderful?
There is one problem though and anyone that has ever played with a Nerf football will attest to this fact. The more you play with your now nerfed item, the more you toss it around, the more you leave it out in the elements, the more quickly it disintegrates. It cracks. Chunks fall out of it. It gets pockmarked and eventually fails to be of any more use. Meanwhile those of us that were playing with the real football made from old-fashioned, hard leather may have certainly gotten a few sore fingers or even a thumping pain in our chest when our friend drilled that perfect pass to us and put it right on the numbers. But you know what? We still have our ball.
And just like that Nerf football, Nerfitalism will not survive in the long run after everyone has had their turn playing with and abusing it. We are not all socialists yet. But those of us that are not are certainly now Nerfitalists. We cannot fail even if we want to and we will never learn anything and soon we will certainly be all socialists. And we will be socialists by government force if necessary.
J.J. Jackson is a libertarian conservative author from Pittsburgh, PA who has been writing and promoting individual liberty since 1993 and is President of Land of the Free Studios, Inc. He is the Pittsburgh Conservative Examiner for Examiner.com. He is also the owner of The Right Things - Conservative T-shirts & Gifts http://www.cafepress.com/rightthings. His weekly commentary along with exclusives not available anywhere else can be found at http://www.libertyreborn.com
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