Next year, in order to supply nearly 50 million retired and disabled people and their survivors with a monthly benefit check, which by itself will not be sufficient support for these 50 million people, the Social Security Administration will spend 657.3 billion dollars. $585 billion will be sent to the retired and disabled at a per capita average of $11,890 per year (wooee), and the remaining 72.3 billion will be spent on the management of the SSA itself with its 62,000 employees.

That’s right. 62,000 employees and operations & payroll costs of 72.3 billion dollars. (In case you were wondering, that breaks out to about 1.166 million dollars per employee that they either spend or pay themselves with.) And all that for a forced-participation retirement plan that pays less than the national minimum wage to a group of people with the highest cost of living.

From Ron Paul:

The Federal Reserve is killing our dollar, the war is killing our soldiers, police-state methods are killing our civil liberties, and the income tax and bureaucratic meddling are killing our economy.

If we’re not interested in stopping this, if we’re content to elect leaders only because we think they can “win", if we settle for what we’re told to do by the club we registered for the last time we renewed our driver’s license, then what is the point of voting at all? What is the point of “winning"? What will be left for us when the professional winners have taken what they want from us– the only things we have that they want– our vote and our money?

It seems that we give this great privilege of choice away too freely. It’s as if so many of us are like spoiled ex-virgin teenage prostitutes– happy to give away ourselves like candy. We’ve lost our innocence and we’ve stopped making informed decisions. Instead, we give it up to the first pimp with lots of dough and power to come along and demand it of us. We run with a crowd of disenchanted losers, doing what’s easiest, what requires the least conviction, what we can bite the inside of our cheeks, shut our eyes, and get through without crying.

I think it’s time we stop. I think it’s time we ask ourselves what’s really important to us. I think it’s time we re-examine those things we hold most dear and rediscover the deeply buried love of the principle of this country that I suspect lurks somewhere within all of us. In this age of torpor, we may be numb; but, we’ve never been more connected. We can glimpse the suffering that goes on outside the relative safety of our borders, and some part of us knows to what principles we owe our freedom– crumbling though it may be.

At any moment, we can stop this. We’re only victims of our own apathy. We can take back our independence and power by the simple act of rejecting defacto positions and spoonfed ideas. We can start thinking for ourselves. We’re individuals, and when we act like it, we become free and very powerful. Let’s do it, all of us. Who’s with me?

Despite Fox’s best efforts to mitigate and denigrate Ron Paul’s views, he handled himself extremely well. I don’t know if a truly intelligent, principled man (or woman) can actually win a presidential election. But, for those of us who desperately want such a leader who takes Constitutional responsibility seriously, Ron Paul is certainly our best hope in 2008.

I’ve neglected this blog in recent months, because I haven’t had any new insights to share regarding capitalism and culture, and even now I don’t want to deviate from the blog’s original purpose by transforming it into a Ron Paul support site. Still, this man is standing up for individual freedom and government accountability, and his views are relevant to the discussion topics of this weblog.