, and military decline. Everyone sees it, and everyone knows it, and yet no one seems to care enough to stop it. We put a man on the moon with slide rules, but we can’t keep plane doors from falling off mid-flight. We harnessed the atom and discovered the secret to limitless clean energy but decided it would be better to pockmark the land with giant bird blenders masquerading as windmills. We rescued a world at war with itself not once but twice, but couldn’t manage to defeat an inbred band of Stone Age goat herders. Our streets used to be the envy of the world, and now they’re filled with excrement, tents, and needles. The dollar was once the international symbol of strength and stability, but a century of overspending and delusional monetary policy has its value by 95 percent. Imagine America as a car. Then imagine the government stole it from you, used it as an ashtray, drove it off a cliff, sold off the remaining parts, gave the cash proceeds to its shady foreign friends, and then billed you for the damages. That is what our politicians have done to this country. We are rapidly approaching the point where the decline becomes irreversible. And the most evil and tragic aspect of the entire situation is that it never had to be this way. It was all preventable. But none of the people in position to prevent it had any interesting in stopping the decline, because they were too busy using it to get more money and power for themselves.