I Don't Want To Own No Damn Dairy Cow in 2012!

I enjoy reading theCL Report at the Classic Liberal blog. The links are fun and informative.

However, theCL Report of December 30, 2011 contained this link to Mother Earth News: Start a 1-Acre, Self-Sufficient Homestead. In the article, the author suggested owning a single dairy cow.

Is this what life in America has come to?

I've lived over six decades in this great country. I grew up as a boy thinking I could be and do whatever I put
my mind to. The United States was the land of opportunity. Every day was great because I knew tomorrow was going to be a bigger and greater day. I read soaring novels like Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. President Kennedy set America's sights on landing men on the moon and returning them safely to earth. Nothing seemed too big or too impossible for an ambitious man to achieve.

I set my sights high. I was the first in my family to attend college. I started a successful business. I saved for my retirement. I was set to enjoy my elder years reading, studying, spending my time thinking and writing in places like this blog!

And now this damn country starts losing its mind! Well, not exactly start. We Americans have been going to hell in the proverbial hand basket for years. First, the house I had worked hard to pay off lost its value. Then, the stock market crash scrambled my nest egg. And the money I do manage to save now earns 37 cents a year in interest compounded daily!

The moron kids in the 60's started this stupid slide. I ought to know. I was one of them. We took to the streets because we thought our parents were too square to know their ass from a hole in the ground. We rebelled. We grew our hair long, killed God and family and screwed everything that moved. Well, I didn't do that. I wanted to, but my square parents wouldn't let me.

No! I wouldn't let me. I actually believed in that stuff I was reading that Ayn Rand wrote: values, living life as man qua man -- that stuff!

The morons weren't all wrong. As they say, even a broke clock is right twice a day. The War in Vietnam WAS about as stupid and as big of a waste of good young men as our fathers could dream up. I was against it. I avoided it like the plague. I was against the war trend it started. Continuing our slide down, down, down. The Cold War. Iraq. Afghanistan. Iran? The perpetual War on Terror.

Now we've got a President and half the people in the country who believe in redistributing my wealth.

What the hell is that?

Like inflation, The Great Recessions and The Giant Bubbles weren't good enough for them? No. They've figured out a more efficient and direct way: simply take it! And hand it out to somebody else who needs it more or wants its more or deserves it more than I do. Let's face it! They're giving it to their pals, not some needy and hungry guy down the street.

And what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to survive?

I'm supposed to buy an acre of land with what little they leave me and grow carrots and lettuce, raise chickens and pigs and own a damn dairy cow so I won't starve.

This is how I'm supposed to spend my golden years?

Bull crap!!

Screw anyone who thinks that way! And screw those in Washington who think this new redistribution of wealth thing is better for me than the good old United States that I grew up in!

What the hell happened to that old United States? What the hell happened to us?

You work your entire life, and you're supposed to measure success by the pint of milk you squeeze out of dairy cow's teat each morning and night?

That's bull shit! This is the 21st century. My great, great, great grandfather's idea of success was owning a subsistence farm and single, damn dairy cow! That was his dream not mine! It was a great dream for him because he came from the old country where owning a single dairy cow and your own plot of land was a step up from owning a bunch of chickens as a serf on somebody else's land. He came to America for the opportunity to own a single cow. But that isn't what he wanted for his son and his son's sons!

He'd roll over in his grave if he knew the life's dream of his great, great, great grandson was owning an acre of land and milking a single cow.

What made this country great was freedom and property and the freedom to get more property and improve your life. If we wanted to be a dairy farmer, we dreamed of owning a herd of thousands of cows! We grew out of dreaming about owning a single cow a century ago. We grew up trading with each other. We built this great country on the principle of the division of labor. That means if you're smart enough to be a physicist or a computer geek or a tool and die maker, you become a physicist or a computer geek or a tool and die maker, not a damn hermit raising a single cow!

For the new generation out there, I'll explain it to you again in smaller words!

You do what you're best at. You earn money! And, if you want carrots or pork or beef or milk, you go to the store and trade for it with the money you earned! That's the division of labor! That's success! That's prosperity! You build factories and stores and markets.

You don't stop at owning a single damn cow!

That's going backwards! That's not where I'm going.

You buy into that idea and, before you know it, your children are setting their sights on being satisfied having a single chicken in their pot before they retire and die.

Owning a damn cow!

You can't be serious!!