The Politics of "Me".....

We've been witnessing it for about 20 years now, and it just keeps getting worse, and worse.
We have a whole generation that thinks that they are "literally" entitled. Their parents, wanting better for this generation, gave them anything they wanted...and asked for little in return. Most of them had no chores, no responsibilities in the house they grew up in, and never suffered the consequences of bad decisions.
Now, when they left home, and their parents were no longer responsible for their immediate needs, the next step in their agenda was to lobby the government to take care of those needs. And if you get enough of these morons together to vote as a Majority (aka -the last Election) we're all going to pay for their needs, nevermind the fact that WE worked hard, and belong to the "Do the Right Thing Club"--with special emeritus membership to the "No Matter What" Chapter...
Look, They walk into McDonald's and want to manage the stores on their first day...working the counter or the flipping station is for the "little people" in their minds.

When they started having children themselves, and thought that the government owed them "gold-plated" education for their sorry offspring, they vote time after time for referendums to fund schools. Many of them do not possess the "common sense" or the flat out logic to comprehend that they've just incurred huge debts in order to splurge on their kid's educations.
But there is another voter out there that is smart enough to understand that debt, but just doesn't care... because they know that they'll get the benefit of those schools and be long gone before the bill comes due.

Like the losers who started trading fuel futures at the end of the earning curve (those that were a day late and a dollar short) who were very impressed with themselves when they made $50 bucks on their fuel futures, and then had to hand the wife a $100 bill to fuel the family SUV....all the while never making the connection, or figuring out that not only were they in the hole $50 bucks, but they had also lightened the rest of our wallets equally.

We've seen three seperate, but distinctly similar revisions of this scenario. The first was the Dotcom boom and fall. More recently, the Real Estate boom and fall, and the last go around was the fuel futures rise and fall.
As a very wise man said... "First come the innovators, then the imitators, and finally, the idiots."
By the time the idiots are buying in on the failing stocks, the innovators have already moved on and are making their money on the next investment.

And this "entitled" culture has also removed the middle class (they now refer to themselves as the "Nuevo Riche"-- depite having $1.2 MIL homes that they cannot afford to fill with furniture, Cadillac Escalades that they cannot afford to fill with gasoline, and credit cards that they are just managing the minimum payments on), stomped on personal responsibility, sqaushed work ethic, and morally bankrupted a whole generation, and have started passing this tradgedy of ignorance onto another generation.

Where this gets tricky...

Now we have a culture of excess in this country. The culture is readily observed in Wall Street, and many CEO's of Corporations, where despite abysmal performance, they still are able to reign in multi-million dollar bonuses and salaries. And more recently, a few even give an in-your-face rationale when they are caught in a concatenation of spending sprees like it's the good 'ol days before the Company was moribund. Why in the world AIG executives didn't nix three splurges of the Company's dime (and our bailout money) is beyond intractable. It's yet another bastardization of entitlement.

Add to this Barney Frank's drafting of legislation to "bail" out Ford and GM, and you begin to see the general feelings of socialism in that particular waste of a human. In their heyday, beginning around 1993 --and with the takeoff of the SUV, those automobile giants made $10K of PROFIT on EVERY SUV that rolled off of the showroom floor. Not the Dealer...the MANUFACTURER.
So $10K for every SUV sold from 1993 until 2007 (when the price of gas dropped the desire to own one) was profit. That's AFTER the labor and materials was paid. What on earth did Ford and GM do with that money? I'm one person, but I say let 'em work it out in bancruptcy court.
The market takes care of these things.

If Toyota builds a superior product at a better price, then perhaps it should move to the front of the line and serve as incentive to these turds to put a little more effort into their profession. And don't even get me started on the effects of the Unions in all this. (In full disclosure, I should offer that I worked several years as a union "buster". I've had fingers poke my chest, bats swung at me, and been called a jack-booted thug more times than anyone can imagine--so before you start---anything a reader can hurl is going to be pretty tame compared to that)

EVEN more later.