Charles T. Lempke, President and CEO of Facts, Inc. coming to us all the way from the US, about problem of the illegal Muslim population throughout all of Europe.
Reference @ http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_10_14/How-to-tackle-the-problem-of-illegal-Muslim-immigrants-in-Europe/
If you look at Europe there is a panel discussion about the threats of the illegal Muslim population throughout all of Europe.
That’s a hell of a problem.
Yes, it is. And they have very different values. To take it to the extreme they have a different legal system that they believe should apply to them. They have entirely different set of values and yet in many parts of Europe and other places where they said – we welcome people, we are not going to harass you too much – there the numbers have grown to such a high percentage or proportion and they now have some effective force that if you don’t agree with them they can cause problems.
Because in some places they are a majority now.
Absolutely! They realized the problem – if you begin to allow this how long is it before the well intentioned people now fall into a minority and therefore cannot control the rules, regulations, laws, policies and programs of the country.
That’s a million dollar question.
And the only answer to that is – the reason we have immigration laws is so that we can control the number and percentage of people within our borders that supposedly come here with different values, and then we want them to adopt our values. Instead what is happening is – large numbers of people are just appearing and they want us to adopt their values.
You’ve hit the nail on the head variant. That is exactly the problem. People get reelected by promising people things, benefits they don’t have to pay for. So, for people in Congress, if we don’t have term limits then they can be reelected and stay there for 20-50 years. When that happens all they are really doing is promising benefits to people, to sectors of population, that they don’t have to pay for. And that’s a very serious problem. I think that’s one of the most serious problems in our country.
Not only in your country, I think it is universal.
Well, I don’t like to characterize problems in other people’s homes. But I would agree with you, that absolutely is. And one of the things that we’ve talked about in this country is having term limits. You know, right now in this country the Congress, our law makers can make a law and then exempt themselves from it.
How come?
Because they make the law. As an example, one of the most recent things in this country and one of the large topics is universal healthcare – everybody should be entitled to universal healthcare. So, Congress passed the law and said – everybody is entitled to it – and they wrote up 2000 pages or 20 000 pages of rules and regulations on how this is going to work. And then they exempted themselves from those rules. Congress exempts themselves from lots of rules. For instance one of the things Congress does is – if you work in this country, after you retire you get some proportion of what you had as a salary perhaps. But Congress has made it so they get full salary for life, full benefits for life even if they only work one term.
Oh!
Yes, they treat themselves very well. But they are the ones who make the laws and they can exempt themselves or make laws and rules that affect them nobody else. So, that’s a serious problem. And what started that line of discussion was that politicians want to get votes, and the way you get votes is to promise benefits for people – I’m going to take care of you, I’m going to do things for you, I’m going to increase these things in your area. But they don’t have to pay for it.
For the most part governments do not earn any money. The only money they have is the money they take in taxes. And that gets us to another area what I think is probably one of the biggest problems in America – that we are spending more than we are making. We are taking in these taxes, we’ve been doing that for a while, this deficits nobody, not an individual, not a family, not the business, not a country and spend more than they make for very long. And what’s happened is, not only just the illegal immigrants but many of the people who have been promised benefits for a long period of time and then receiving benefits for a long period of time, the only solution to this is to reduce those benefits. Those people are not going to want their benefits reduced and you see what happens when governments have to do that in Europe.
I foresee that with similar problems here in the US we have to begin reducing those benefits. If you look at all of the money, if you look at the entire US budget – we have two different kinds of expenditures. We have mandated expenditures – those are all the social programs, the debt and things that we have to pay. And then you have discretionary expenditures – that’s running of all the rest of the Government. If you look at the total income or tax receives of the Government – it is not enough to cover the mandatory expenditures. That means that if you were to wipeout the entire US Government – every department, branch, military, everything of the US Government – we still wouldn’t have enough money to pay our bills for all the programs we have.
So, when they talk about going to a department and taking some small amount of money which sounds like a lot – we want to cut you by a billion dollars – that sounds like a lot, but in a multi trillion dollar budget a billion dollars is nothing. And it is coming from an area that has absolutely no impact on our total debt.
Yes, it is interesting that you are saying that because only today we’ve been discussing something which actually looks like a set of systemic problems that seem to be pushing the world economy into some kind of a quagmire. And since those problems are systemic, and what you are telling me looks like systemic problems too, like I said, they look quite universal, at least they are very typical, they are there in the developed countries. That’s what we can see and this is something we are living through in now because with the new system which we have adopted over the couple of decades we have also taken it up with all those systemic problems which are there, which are integrated into it. So, is there any way out, I mean is there any way out to correct the system, to relieve it of the systemic deficiencies it has?
In the problem I see two folds. One of them is a political leadership and politicians. And the second is just the general work ethic and the decline of work ethic of the people. If you go back to the Great Depression here in the US when people went out and they worked, manual labour and so forth, and then the unions came in and said – you make them work too long, we want to reduce hours. After World War II the Japanese worked six-day weeks, in America we used to work six-day weeks, and then it was reduced to five and a half, he got altered half day and set a five day up to three and four day weeks. But if you look at the Japanese after WW II, they were working six and a half day work weeks to rebuild their country, they had a tremendously strong work ethic and everything else.
But over time they said – we don’t need to work as hard, we don’t need to work as long. It is the same in Germany and even in China now, and is the same in Korea. But even in China now you see, where the masses were working six-day weeks, now they work five and a half or they are working five-day work weeks, they are getting more things to get their life easier and more benefits. The Government is trying to do more for them, they are building roads, they are building infrastructure. All is good in terms of growth of civilization. But as that happens people lose some of that work ethic and as they do that, then it makes it harder to have to go back to that.
They grow to be too content.
Yes.
And that changes their motivation.
Exactly! And then I think it is the politicians who want make things better for people being well spirited but also they realize that gets them votes and gets them reelected. Our politicians in this job being in Congress and even the President of the US which was never meant to be a job per se, it was almost like a part time thing, it was something he did, he went there for a couple of years to help the country and then he went back to his regular job. Now it’s become a job onto itself. And that’s a problem.
And on the other hand when you are telling me that people grow to be too content, do you think that it is also an issue of consumer values? Doesn’t it demotivate many people in the society, I mean they are only working to earn more and that leaves little space for something like ethics?
Right! And that’s what happened in America in the 80’es. We had a tremendous influx of people in the colleges who got degrees in business, business management and so forth. And what they were taught there wasthat to get in a business it is the bottom-line, it is how much you succeed in increasing the profits of the business.
That’s it!
And as a consequence they lost their ethics. And so, again two generations. We have so many people in the country who have not had that kind of ethic. We also have tended to really diminish the value of religion. I won’t advocate any particular religion. Most religions were founded on, I wouldn’t say things like the golden rules – doing well, being kind, helpful – whatever, and as we’ve gotten away from the religious influence of both the parents and the church, that was an excellent source of good values and ethics in people – we have lost that.
Sir, thank you so much. And just to remind you our guest speaker was Charles T. Lempke – President and CEO of Facts, Inc.
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