Posted by
skep41 on Monday, November 24, 2008 1:20:50 PM
The
Fed is poised to 'lend' an additional $7.4 trillion to financial
institutions on top of the $2.8 trillion they've already 'leant' to the
banks since the beginning of this crisis a few weeks ago. The gross
national product of this country is $13 trillion. Obama and the Dems
are heading to DC to hand some pathetically tiny $200 billion or so
'stimulus package' to the peasants. Meanwhile every Blue State in the
country is collapsing in a sea of red ink and will surely be bailed out
by the munificent Big Brother. The Feds have still got some of that
Fan-Fred $700 bil that they're handing out to cover the phony
mortagages. The line at the bailout door grows daily. With all this
stimulation and two-buck gas we should be in a howling boom, our phones
ringing off the hook from calls from desperate employers trying to lure
us from our current jobs with higher pay.
Its nice to know that
the government has an extra ten or fifteen trillion bucks on hand to
help us all through these tough times. Its must be those foreign
investors clamoring to grab a piece of the coming Obama Boom lending us
the money to stand behind these 'loans' to the banks who were
impoverished by the government removing all qualifying criteria from
lending. So we all received dozens of credit card offers, whether we
had a job or not. Lets party! After all we all have hundreds of
thousands of dollars in equity from these frame and drywall shacks we
were clever enough to buy. A country of millionaires...on paper. Real
Estate never goes down, you see.
OOPS! a slight miscalculation.
Meanwhile every parasite and overpaid public official have sat back,
content that they had enough political juice to protect their 'right'
to a cushy livetime job, followed by a fat pension; the social security
recipients just had to snivel in front of the TV cameras in phony
interviews set up by AARP and big new 'benefits' are added to their
'entitlements': rural corporations grow fat off ethanol subsidies and
the waste ground is covered by non-functioning windmills and broken
solar panels, all collecting a hefty subsidy check. The list of
recipients is endless and probably includes everyone in the country and
a whole bunch of foreigners. As government grows its so easy to hide
favors and handouts in the thousand-paged appropriation bills and after
all, we all win!
Now the 401k's are headed for worthlessness,
the fat government and union pension plans are holding 'paper' assets
that aren't worth the paper their written on--bonds issued by the state
and municipal governments that their improvident wage and benefit
demands have bankrupted.
WHAT?! Those pensions are
a right! Aren't they?
Is
this the first time that socialism has been achieved by putting the
entire free economy in receivership. Everything collapses and the
government takes over and runs it according to a Five-Year-Plan.
That'll work. Good times ahead.
But where are they getting all this
money? It must be all the cash that was accumulating in the 'Social
Security Trust Fund' in Algore's lock-box. Ummm...I guess they put all
those 'contributions' into the general fund ; anyway Social Security is
about to take on millions of new recipients as soon as they pass
'Immigration Reform'. Just ship the abuelos north and put'em on the
dole...there's plenty of money!
With all this money floating
around why aren't we all rich? Because money is a reflection of the
ability of the economy to produce wealth. The ability of this economy
to produce wealth is shrinking as the inexorable demands of the
recipients of subsidies are expanding enormously.
The
corollaries of socialism are poverty and inflation and we are seeing it
happen before our eyes. We are also seeing the electorates turning to
Big Brother in the hope that they will get something for nothing. I
grew up in Las Vegas among hustlers and cheats. The working definition
of a sucker in that world is someone who wants something for nothing.
That's a good definition in any world. Its also a good definition of
the average voter.
Another thing that happens to suckers, or
chumps as they are also known, is that there is a moment when they
realize that they've been hornswoggled. Conservatives dream that that
will be the day that the herd turns to Milton Freedman and FA Hayek and
demands rational reforms. Don't bet on it. Tyranny and mob violence are
much more likely. Democracy got us into this mess by empowering
interest groups to grab control of the system and milk it. Democracy
will not get the demands of all these disparate groups under control.
Scarce resources will have to be allocated by fiat. Period. Thats
Change We Can Believe In!