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Beliefs One Does Not Believe

Howell Hurst Uncategorized

San Diego, where I have lived the past nine months, is a city that professes beliefs it doesn’t believe. Those words, by the way, according to my American Heritage Desk Dictionary, define: Hypocrisy.

That’s an accurate assertion. Because San Diego contends it is a Conservative city. Not so. It is not Conservative. It is not Liberal either. It is Hypocritical. My factually evidential substantiation for this claim? Glad to oblige you.

One in every five San Diego dollars, according to the local NPR radio station, is a Federal defense dollar sent here from Washington, D.C., having been collected from all the 49 states to bankroll America’s Pacific Fleet and its defense manufacturing and service support base.

One such of five dollars in my books from all the rest of us does not constitute Conservatism. It is Socialism. A city defense economy is essentially Socialism. It is the entire nation bankrolling a cause for the good of all of us. We all own it. Expensive too. Tens of $Billions annually to one city. Socialism. Plain and simple.

Now, San Diego does not claim to not believe in and be Hypocritical about defense. They certainly do believe in the Pacific Fleet. Most of us probably do so also – at least in theory. It is the Socialism of the city’s economy the citizens are Hypocritical about. They like to call it free market Capitalism.

I repeat myself: capital that is collected from everyone for a national purpose by the Government and dispersed to a specific place for a specific purpose for everyone is not Capitalism. It is Socialism. And San Diego has sure greatly benefited from this largesse in ways most cities and us people have been denied.

The existence of the money here is undeniable. Big tall new buildings. Big long bridges. Beautiful, well-kept public appurtenances, like pothole-free streets, public parks, waterfront business parks, ballparks, very expensive yacht clubs and marinas – all kinds of goodies that many cities do not possess quite so new and tidy and splendiferously constructed.

There is also an inordinately well-to-do local investment industry fed by the defense dollars. Pacific Fleet dry docks running south down the shore for miles, almost to Mexico, kick out a lot of cash to locals. Excesses of it get invested in giant Wall Street funded Corporations, thereby continuously reinvigorating the Washington political money presses.

Am I against maintenance facilities for our Pacific Fleet? Theoretically, no. I am not. That subject, however, is not my present subject. Not today anyhow. Another time.

My present subject is how an alleged politically Conservative bunch of city people can live in the myth that they are Capitalists when their capitalism is primarily funded by and made so successful by Socialism – and they either don’t see it, or have forgotten it, or have never quite understood it, or want to pretend it doesn’t exist, and never has.

But, Conservative capitalism, as we may also currently see in the antics of the present national administration, appears to use words substantially more flippantly than the rest of us.

Words to them seem to be simplistic attention getters to allow them to then amend with other words in order to explain what they themselves seem to be trying to figure out what they think they mean when they auspiciously blurt them from their guts through their brains out loud to their mouths. Understand?

You know what I mean?

Socialized Capitalism. You’d think people whose own incomes predominantly derive from such a system would be more accommodating in allowing such a concept to edge over into the needs of all other people – like into a comprehensive national life-supporting health care system, for example. Huh?

Wouldn’t you?

I would.

www.howellhurst.com

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