It’s like a movie set: looks impressive on the outside, until you peek behind the facade.
Right now, the facade ain’t looking too great either. Or my 401k, for that matter.
No sooner do I make a sweeping categorical statement about avoiding politics, that it once again becomes unavoidable.
Wall Street is not reacting to phony budget cuts, they’re reacting to the fact that these sorts of promises are never kept. And because they’re also good at math, they probably figured out the government-spending-as-compound-interest problem long before I stumbled onto it.
The Keynesian supports have finally been kicked out from under us, and we’re about to finish the reckoning that began in 2008. The fact that our betters did so much to postpone it will only make things worse. Too much of our economy was driven by debt, both Federal and individual. When you live beyond your means long enough, the inevitable withdrawals are painful.
In a sense, it’s a good thing that we have such a hard-left President. A great deal of our current problems have their origins in policies the left has pushed since the ’70s. After decades of quietly sabotaging the economy, it’s fitting that they should own it.
But enough of my blathering. Guys like Roger Kimball at PJ Media make me wonder why I even try blogging. An excerpt from his must-read piece:
“Alas, we threw caution to the winds and elected someone who resented this country, was suspicious of wealth, and whose reflexive commitment to left-wing nostrums would gravely damage the most productive economy the world has ever seen. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people will suffer because of our naïveté and Barack Obama’s malevolent stupidity.”
And finally, a timeless quote from Heinlein via Glenn Reynolds:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
The Chiles Files 