Let’s get all the cliches out of the way up front.  What goes around comes around.  Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.  Everything old is new again.  You get the point.  Currently, we live in a world that’s been turned upside down.  Just take a look around.  The inmates are running the asylum.  The border has been erased, and more than 10 million invaders have been admitted.  Now we’re expected to support them.  Illegal drugs, which were made illegal due to their lethality and tendency to ruin people’s lives, are now legal.  The government, instead of “just say no,” is saying “yes,” and actually aiding and abetting drug addiction.  And it’s not just drug laws.  We live in a world where it’s considered extremist or racist to enforce any law.  Crime is rampant in the streets.  Government permits it.  Organized theft gangs are emptying stores.  Police are handcuffed, and if the store owners dare resist, they’re prosecuted.  The law’s not the law anymore, or more precisely, some laws are not the law anymore.  On Saturday I visited friends in New York City.  We wanted to smoke cigars outdoors, but we had to be careful, because cigar smoking is illegal in Central Park, so we had to be sure to remain outside the park to avoid arrest.  Conversely, if I was smoking a giant Jamaican doobie instead of a cigar, no problem, as the constant stench of cannabis smoke wafted down every street in the City.  But I digress.  The truth’s not even the truth anymore.  The government, and the lapdog media tell us things like, “the border is secure,” “the crime rate isn’t going up,” and “the economy’s great,” and we’re supposed to believe it.  A large segment of our population has become numb.  It puts me in mind of the Soviet author who observed, “The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.”  And the Hell of it is that outside forces haven’t done this to us, we’ve done it to ourselves.  Our own government has sown the seeds of destruction.  What is government for anyhow?  Thomas Hobbes saw government as the social contract we make to protect some our personal rights from the all-out warfare that would ensue without it.  Our Framers made it clear in the Constitution, which was enacted to, “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”  Has our government failed?  Do we have justice?  Is our nation tranquil?  Is it secure?  Can we promote the general welfare when we’re $33 trillion in debt?  Have any of you been blessed by liberty lately?  I sure haven’t.  The entire social fabric of our country has drastically changed, but it’s nothing new.  It’s happened before.  At the beginning of what came to be called the Roaring Twenties, the government unintentionally ushered in a period of lawlessness by enacting Prohibition.  Over night, the production and sale of alcohol was made illegal.  It was done with the best of intentions.  A bunch of straight-laced, God-fearing folks were going to put an end to alcoholism, thereby ending domestic violence, and ensuring that families were protected.  It didn’t work.  People didn’t like being told they couldn’t do what they wanted to do.  The well-intentioned 18th Amendment was largely ignored.  When the legal alcohol dried up, people turned to illicit means to obtain it, and groups that were not well-meaning took full advantage.  The prohibition of alcohol permitted mobsters to corrupt otherwise law abiding citizens and public officials, and to make millions of dollars.  We’re still feeling the effects of what was called The Noble Experiment today.  What does any of that have to do with today’s fiascos?  Plenty, because the insanity we’re experiencing is attributable to the opposite of prohibition.  We’re falling apart because of entitlement.  In 1920, government told people what they couldn’t do, and things went to Hell.  A hundred years later, it’s telling them they can do whatever they want, with the same result.  Not prohibition, but entitlement is to blame.  The Left has been marching steadily toward the precipice on which we’re now perched for a long time.  Since the 1960’s they’ve been breaking down our senses of morality and propriety.  Morality and propriety were tied to religious values, so religion was ridiculed and the religious smeared as extremists.  I don’t want the government in our bedrooms any more than the Left did, but there’s a lot of territory between Puritanism and our current Sodom and Gomorrah.  Ever notice how any attempt to restore order is denounced as “a threat to our freedom?”  I’m all for freedom, but it’s not freedom the Left is selling, it’s license.  There’s a difference.  Personal freedom exists within a framework in which your freedom does no harm to others.  When you’re free to do whatever you want regardless of the consequences, that’s license.  It’s where the word “licentious” comes from, and we’ve run amok.  The trend toward condoning crime was born out of the misguided notion that law enforcement equals racism.  So if you want to protest the police by burning down your city, including police stations and courthouses, we have to “give you space” to act out.  If you’re angry (and not a Trump supporter) you’re entitled.  If you want to be stoned on hard drugs all day and night, who are we to judge?  You’re entitled.  Government will supply you with needles and even Narcan to bring you back when you overdose.  And as the America we once knew is carried away on a wave of license, keep this in mind.  During Prohibition the bad actors who took advantage of the disruption of society were mobsters.  The people taking advantage of the Age of Entitlement are also mobsters, only they’re working for the government.  It’s the Leftists in government who, in the name of democracy, are slowly but surely eroding the freedoms promised to us by the Founders for their own purposes.  The bootleggers just wanted to make money.  These bastards are actively encouraging behaviors that are designed to and inevitably will lead to the collapse of our Republic, in favor of their imaginary Socialist Worker’s Paradise.  We ended Prohibition by passing the 21st Amendment.  Ending Entitlement won’t be so easy.  We’ll have to convince the victims of educational malpractice that there is no free lunch, that bad actions do have consequences, and that hard work is better than entitlement.  That’s a hard lift.  Prohibition ended during the Great Depression.  It may take another crash to cast out license and restore freedom.