The Road to Serfdom and the Road to Socialism are parallel lanes of the same road

"empty platitudes seem instantaneously
familiar and yet irrelevant"

Fat cats in big business intertwined with Fatter Cats of Government sucking the the marrow from the "folks" and small businesses they regard as their serfs.
Is there a bigger fall in store for America, by design from treachery, from both within and without?
Is there a Dark Ages looming with a vacuum to be filled, this time by Muslim and Climate Change fanatics instead of a Catholic central hierarchy, as in the last "Dark Ages"? m/r

Are We Becoming Medieval? - Victor Davis Hanson - National Review Online

OCTOBER 24, 2012 By Victor Davis Hanson A tourist mecca like Venice now boasts that it dreams of breaking away from an insolvent Italy. Similarly Barcelona, and perhaps the Basques and the Catalonians in general, claim they want no part of a bankrupt Spain. Scotland fantasizes about becoming separate from Great Britain. The Greek Right dreams of a 19th-century Greece without Asian and African immigrants who do not look Greek. Belgium increasingly seems an artificial construct, half Flemish, half French, with the two sides never more estranged. These days Texas and California do not even seem like two parts of a united nation, just as Massachusetts is growing ever more distant from Wyoming. Here at home, it is not just that taxation and government are different in red and blue states, or that for the last two decades national elections have hinged on what the shrinking number of purple-state voters prefer. Social and cultural questions are also dividing us, almost as much as slavery did in the 1850s. Fault lines over abortion, the role of religion, gay marriage, affirmative action, welfare, illegal immigration, and gun ownership are starting to manifest themselves regionally. We have long had the Blue–Gray game; soon will there be a Red–Blue Bowl?  If Mexico plays against the U.S. soccer team in Merced, Fresno, or L.A., will the spectators root for the country in which they live or the country that they left?... ... Why is there today a nostalgia for localism? Shrinking Western populations with growing numbers of elderly and unemployed can no longer sustain their present level of redistributive taxation and entitlements. Europe, which can endure neither the disease of insolvency nor the supposed medicine of austerity, is only a decade ahead of what we should expect here in the United States, or what we see now in California — a construct more than a state, where the Central Valley is to the coast as Mississippi is to Massachusetts. Voters are also disgusted with government, and feel that their overseers are not even subject to the consequences of what they impose on others: We expect the Obamas to trash the 1 percent as they jet to Martha’s Vineyard, or a zillionaire John Kerry to demand higher taxes as he seeks to avoid them on his yacht, or an upscale French Socialist president to have a home on the Mediterranean — or, on the other side of the ledger, social-conservative elites to speak and act like metrosexuals. - go to the link-