History In the Eye of the Beholder

SEE HERE History is written by the victors. I don't know how many times I've heard that. Moreover, history is just-so stories, often told with the intention to influence the present just as everything President Obama utters. We would probably prefer history to be about what actually happened, but people rarely unpack the dense mish-mash of ideas and concepts, presuppositions and cultural norms that make up not only the tissue of the history but the manifest complexity of understanding it properly. We tend to see history through the lenses of our own presuppositions at the present time. I just got a copy of Milton Friedman's book "Money Mischief" subtitled "Episodes in Monetary History." Much of what is going on currently would have been totally incomprehensible to our forefathers of only a little over a hundred years ago. The income tax is a relatively recent thing on the American scene dating only from 1913 with the passage of the 16th amendment.

The people who passed that amendment would be horrified by what it has produced. Increasingly we live in a nation where many people have lost their sense of personal responsibility and imagine that it is the duty of their neighbor to take care of them. That is a rather huge exaggeration of the real situation. We all have a duty to help one another, but we also have a duty to do everything we can, to the extent of our ability, to help ourselves first. The current political scene is one of ever deeper irresponsibility. That's an unstable and unsustainable trend which necessarily ends catastrophically.