"A Nation Needs Powerful, Wealthy,
Ambitious Men"
from "In Defense of
Rural America"
By Ron Ewart,
President
National Association of Rural Landowners (www.narlo.org)
and nationally recognized author and
speaker on freedom and property rights issues for over 10
years
Our last two articles, "An Establishment Always Evolves Into An
All-powerful Oligarchy
" and "Men In Dark Suits, Blue Smoke and Backroom
Deals", ripped the hide
off of powerful, wealthy, ambitious men and for good reason. Still, having done
so, it must be abundantly obvious to anyone with half an intellect that the
huddled masses and the poor don’t build anything. So if it wasn’t for those same
powerful, wealthy, ambitious men, steel wouldn’t have been made, skyscrapers,
bridges, locomotives and ships would have not been built, oil would not have
been refined into gasoline, fuel oil, paints, resins and nylon stockings, and a
largely untamed land would have not been tamed. And if it weren’t for the bold
financiers who took the huge risks to fund those ventures, none of it would have
been possible.
The days of the railroad and land barons of the
latter half of the 1800’s and into the early 1900’s was a picture of good and
evil working together to build a nation. America grew at an unprecedented rate
during this time under the flag of freedom. It seems that no matter what a man
could dream up, he could bring it to fruition in this great land, if he was
bold, brave, ambitious, a little greedy and sometimes ruthless.
Railroads crisscrossed the land from the
Atlantic to the Pacific and to all points on the compass, built out of the steel
Andrew Carnegie created in his smelters, smelters fired by the almost un-limited
coal that lay under the ground for anyone with the courage to dig it up. The
railroad and the "Iron Horse" became the conduit to passenger people and freight
all over America, on a ribbon of steel rails and crossties. Nevertheless, it was
no easy task. The railroad builders battled Indians, the weather, landowners and
the land itself. Routes for the railroad right-of-way became political battles
between states, towns and townships. If these powerful men didn’t border on
ruthless, the railroad would have never been built.
John D. Rockefeller turned crude oil into the
fuel to power our early cars, ships and light our lamps. Westinghouse gave us
alternating current generators, created by the genius inventor, Nikola Tesla.
Westinghouse and Tesla gave us light at night from light bulbs created by the
prolific inventor, Thomas Edison. Charles Goodyear, a self-taught indigent
chemist, gave us vulcanized rubber. Samuel Morse gave us the telegraph and his
assistant, Alfred Vail, developed the Morse Code. Ford gave us the assembly line
and the car and expanded our freedom to reach out across the land at faster and
faster speeds. The horse and horse-drawn buggy, wagon and stagecoach became the
victim of the railroad and the car. J. P. Morgan, as ruthless as he was,
provided the funds for many of these risky ventures. At one point Morgan even
bailed out the federal government.
America needed these powerful men to take it
from a wilderness, agrarian society to a civilized nation, all the while
increasing the standard of living of every American. Our wealth allowed us to
become the most powerful nation on earth. Our wealth and our growing standard of
living were the envy of every other nation on earth and still are today.
But with the good, came the evil. Workers were
viciously exploited, leading to unions. Landowners were run over as if they
weren’t there. Suppliers were ripped off. The land was raped. To stop the
railroad and land barons, violence broke out in the form of land wars, riots,
robbery and sabotage.
Miners and loggers took the resources from the
land and left it scarred and ruined. Hydraulic mining tore the land to pieces
and sluiced it down into streams, rivers and lakes, poisoning them. Loggers took
the giant trees and left the forest floor littered with branches and smaller
trees that were in the way when the big ones came crashing down. After a dry
summer, the forest floor turned into tinder dry fuel for out-of-control,
explosive forest fires.
To stem the tide of these no-rules, free-for-all
industrial and land barons, mining companies and loggers, government was forced
to pass laws. Now we are not a fan of laws and regulations but when a group of
people harm other people and the land on a grand scale, laws become necessary.
To slow the industrial barons down, anti-trust laws were passed and monopoly
corporations were broken up. Even so, powerful, wealthy and ambitious men find
ways around laws and nothing has changed. It has just gotten more subtle and
secretive.
In one of our articles a while back we wrote:
"When your vision is clouded by an irrational obsession, the first things
to leave your soul are honor, morality and virtue." If powerful, wealthy, ambitious men are obsessed with being powerful,
wealthy and ambitious, in most cases their honor, morality and virtue are
crowded out of their soul, if they had any in the first place.
And so it was with the railroad and land barons
of yesteryear and so it is today with the men and women of the Trilateral
Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, every
politician and every powerful, wealthy and ambitious man or woman who seek only
wealth and power for wealth and power’s sake. If nothing stands in their way, as
was the case during the industrial revolution and just as much as it does today,
then the powerful get their way. Our representatives can blunt the power of
these three groups but only if the people put pressure on those representatives
to do so. The problem arises from the fact that so many of our representatives
are card-carrying members of these three groups.
The only thing with enough power to stop them is
the people themselves. If the people fear the powerful and wealthy
industrialist, banker, politician, or bureaucrat, or they don’t care what the
powerful do, then the people can get kings, dictators, oligarchies, corruption
and slavery in return. In that event, the people get what they
deserve.
The hard truth is, without honor in the people,
in businessmen and women, or in politicians, a nation is doomed to burn to the
ground from the fuel of its own corruption. We stand on the precipice of that
failure today.
What has happened to America and our
Constitutional Republic? What catalyst or disease transformed politicians into
men and women who have become ruthless and devoid of honor? No, not all men are
devoid of honor, but way too many of them are. Why have the principles of
freedom and liberty become passé, out-of-date, or just plain irrelevant? How is
it we have morphed into the false loyalty of "my party, right or wrong, my
party." That's Nazi stuff, not American. What on
earth possessed us to "spit" on the foundation of our liberties, in favor of
what ...... Security? Comfort? Entertainment? Have
we lost our collective minds?
Why do so many Americans think it is perfectly
OK to cheat on auto, fire, or medical claims to insurance companies? And we
wonder why insurance premiums are so high! Why do we lie on employment or loan
applications? Why do we engage in the consumption of illegal drugs that get
people killed on both sides of our southern border? It is Americans consuming
illegal drugs that drive the violent drug wars, corruption and the killings in
Mexico and America.
The reason for all these things is that many of
us have lost our honor. A large segment of our American population has lost it
by succumbing to the siren call of a "free" lunch from government, in exchange
for their votes, when we all know the "lunch" isn't free. The politicians have
lost honor because, in a representative government, politicians are a reflection
of the people who vote them into office.
If we do not value honor, integrity and honesty
in ourselves, we will not value those very same qualities in our leaders. In
today's world, those men and women without honor, integrity and honesty continue
to be elected to public office. Therefore, by our own choice, we allow dishonor
and dishonesty to perpetuate itself. Along those same lines we allow powerful,
wealthy and ambitious men to deceive us and run all over us and herd us into
pens like cattle and sheep. We are cajoled and manipulated by the media,
academia, the public schools and our institutions of government that collude
with powerful, wealthy and ambitious men.
Have we become a nation of sheep that does not
think for themselves and cannot recognize a wolf when they see it? Have we
become so numb to reality by drowning in a glutinous diet of entertainment and
self-gratification? Does liberty mean so little that we would sacrifice it out
of fear and intimidation of those with power over us? Are we so afraid of the
bully that we would let him rule us with deception, propaganda, distortions,
lies and sometimes force?
Ladies and gentlemen, we cannot expect our
politicians, businessmen, or union members to be free of corruption if the
American people themselves are corrupt, or hopelessly apathetic. If the
American people are without honor, it is quite likely that those they elect to
office will also be without honor. It is folly, if not just plain stupid, to
expect our representatives to be more perfect than those that put them in
office.
Nevertheless, having said all that, a nation
still needs powerful, wealthy and ambitious men and women to create, finance,
invest, invent, market and build things. The trick is to keep their power, their
wealth and their ambition in check. Laws can’t do that alone. Only honorable
people who care about their freedom can do that. After over two centuries of
trying, we are failing miserably. As a result, our
identity as a free nation and a people and our very sovereignty are in grave
peril.
Over the last 10 years we have written
over 500 articles on freedom, liberty and property rights through our weekly
column. Many of those articles touched on honor, morality and virtue and how
they are irreplaceable elements to a free society and maintaining liberty, not
in a religious context but from a purely pragmatic viewpoint. You can find those
articles on our website by title and date HERE, that
is of course, if you care about such things as freedom, liberty, property
rights, honor, morality and virtue.
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NOTE: The foregoing
article represents the opinion of the author and is not necessarily shared by
the owners, representatives, employees, or agents of the
publisher.
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Ron Ewart, a nationally known author and
speaker on freedom and property rights issues and author of this weekly column,
"In Defense of Rural America", is the president of the National
Association of Rural Landowners (NARLO) (http://www.narlo.org) an advocate and consultant for urban
and rural landowners and a non-profit corporation headquartered in
Washington State. He can be reached for comment at: info@narlo.org.
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