The opening to Ridley Scott’s 2010 film Robin Hood inevitably brings to mind President Donald Trump. The prologue to the film states:
King Richard the Lion Heart, bankrupt of wealth and glory, is plundering his way back to England after ten years on his crusade.
Doesn’t that statement describe what has been occurring in the United States for the past 28 years and where we are today?
Since the end of the Cold War, when the U.S. national-security establishment lost its official enemy, the Soviet Union, the U.S. government has been on a 28-year-long crusade, beginning first in the Middle East and, then later, extending into Afghanistan.
This U.S. foreign crusade has cost the lives of countless people in Afghanistan and the Middle East, especially in Iraq, as well as the deaths and injuries of thousands of American soldiers.
Moreover, the crusade has not been cheap. The U.S. government now owes more than $22 trillion to creditors. Each and every year, President Trump and his Democratic cohorts in Congress are adding $1 trillion to that total. If that debt is ever paid off, it will be done by taxing the American people and using the terror of the IRS to ensure compliance.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is doing its best to ensure that the federal debt is paid off in cheapened, debased dollars, which essentially amounts to a default. In order to avoid paying off the real amount the U.S. government has borrowed from people to fund its 28-year-long crusade, U.S. officials do what kings have done throughout history — they simply print up the money to pay their debts.
Glory? Despite the fact that the Americans people are exhorted to thank the troops for what they have done in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and the rest of the Middle East, no one ever uses the word “glory” to describe participation in this crusade. That’s because it is now dawning on people that this 28-year crusade has turned out to be one rotten, corrupt, deadly, destructive, and sordid enterprise, one in which U.S. soldiers have played the role of pawns.
Meanwhile, somebody has to pay for this long crusade as well for America’s ever-burgeoning welfare state and regulated and centrally managed economy. That somebody means the American people. That’s why they are being plundered and looted, both directly through income taxation and the IRS, and indirectly through the Federal Reserves’s debasement of their money. That’s why so many Americans today are financially strapped, have little or no savings, and live paycheck to paycheck.
Just think if a film is ever made about America’s decades-long crusade. The prologue to that film can read:
Following the path of his predecessors Kings Bush, Clinton, Bush, and
Obama, and, like all of them, bankrupt of wealth and glory, King Trump is plundering his way through America after 28 years of their joint crusade in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and the rest of the Middle East.
