"Time," so the saying goes, "is the cruelest teacher. First she administers the test then she teaches the lesson."

America is on the verge of learning several vital lessons in the realms of economic and moral economy: lessons saturated in pain and hardship and as anchored in nature as universal gravitation or the science of hydraulics.

The first? Actions have consequences; or to place a finer point on it: elections have consequences. Those who told you tales that there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between either party or that the rich were just scaremongering with the bogeymen of: hyperinflation, a flood of coming pink slips, or even threats against grandma's Social Security check, were merely diverting the attention of pliant lemmings from the fiscal cliff looming dead ahead. And as always, those indolent, narcissistic and myopic wretches concerned foremost with milking the cash cow for reconstituted government cheese or Obamaphones -- who live in the eternal present and care not a rat's patoot for any bellies but their own, have found it in their collective Neanderthal interests to keep that moribund and creaking gravy train moving forward at any cost, even though the axles are broken and the resulting sparks threaten to melt down the entire exhausted monstrosity.

Yes, a regime that churns out byzantine regulatory edicts faster than a junkyard dog breeds fleas must now face the very real effects of its ideology on a host that was not healthy to begin with after four years of political transformation. Human nature, being what it is (a construct denied by the liberal intelligentsia), informs us that an organism above all seeks self-preservation -- and whether we are referencing survival in life or in business makes little difference. Having thrown corporations and small businesses an anvil instead of a life preserver, the progressive regime must now reap the consequences of employers' shedding employees to keep their heads above water so that they too do not become the thoughtless casualties of socialistic regression to anemic and rheumatic basket cases. Indeed, these latest job losses are only the initial tip of the iceberg, as the mechanism of economic vitality absorbs and metastasizes the poison of a failed political vision, and the rigor of iron laws inevitably holds sway.

And the second? It is far easier to destroy than to build. It has forever been the desire of Gnostic utopianism to ascend towards temporal perfection, and socialism is of this species in that it would above all else recast humanity into its own incarnation of denatured egalitarianism -- the highest ideal it can conceive of. That the architecture of human nature is fixed and not malleable, therefore becomes a conundrum for this religion's ideologues and engineers who would ply equality as a workman spreads mortar. Moreover, history teaches us that man exhibits a vast continuum of inequalities in every arena he puts his hand to, and that societies that encourage the flourishing and rewarding of these diverse talents, both prudentially through negative liberty and monetarily through acquisition, enrich themselves in the aggregate as a by-product -- they do indeed prosper as a consequence of freedom.

The genius of this inequality is intrinsically anathema to socialism, and try as it may, it can never through its modalities create the wealth necessary for the good life -- it can only deconstruct, redistribute, and eventually wither what it could not fabricate of its own. Thus, what initially finds its beginning in altruism soon descends into coercion and rapaciousness before manifesting impoverishment, despair, and the final loss of liberty. Once it has raided the coffers of its wealthy, it moves against the middle and working classes to support its oligarchy of toadies and technocratic managers -- and as its sustenance dries up, the inevitable tyranny and anarchy becomes the sole endgame left as covetousness becomes the regime's last animating anti-virtue.

But this is by now a rudimentary catechism to everyone not blinded to liberalism's dogmatic articles of faith. In absorbing these two vital lessons, America will endure a weeping and gnashing of teeth that not even the state-run media will be able to meliorate, with its diversionary spectacles and well-crafted genuflection directed towards the preordained seats of power. Some lessons have the therapeutic capacity to either break us irrevocably or to raise us up from the dark caverns of our own self-absorbed hallucinations towards the chill light of redemption and knowledge. It is up to us to choose which avenue we take.