George Will’s editorial in the Lancaster Paper today again demonstrates how far we have strayed from our capitalist moorings and how close we are to turning freedom into slavery.

http://www.reporternews.com/news/2010/may/12/crony-capitalism/

We have been sold (or our representatives have been sold) the bailouts of the last two years because if we did not do it, we would see a collapse of the world economy and such dire consequences that we would all have to rename the Great Depression the Not-so-grand Depression. So to avoid these DIRE problems, we sold the future. We bought comfort for ourselves by selling our children’s freedom. This has already been done. We must now ask: What have we done? Has it produced the desired effect? Who or what did we protect by selling out our children?

Here are my answers:

What have we done?

We have borrowed money in order to bail out people who have borrowed slightly more than us. This is a shell game that will obviously lead to our ruin. We must implement our own austerity measures now. We must deny ourselves comfort and the bloated, unaffordable entitlements that we see as our rights if we are to preserved our children’s freedom. We are now part of the Greece bailout. We have our own Greece on the left coast named California. We have budgeted to run up deficits of $9,700,000,000 during the next decade. We are burying our children in debt and the borrower will still be the slave of the lender. What have we done—nothing that is in our own interest. We have sold out the future.

Has it had the desired effect?

I think that most Americans would vote for bailouts if they actually fixed the problems. As more evidence comes in, we can see that we have not done this. Judgment Day can be pushed into the future. It cannot be avoided with the tactic we have chosen. What we are doing (borrowing more and creating more entitlements) only makes the future financial Armageddon into the future financial Super Armageddon.  We have not protected our comfort for long and we are on the path to destroying the lives of our children. So, if we did not protect ourselves, then who or what did we just protect?

Who or what did we just protect?

As the evidence comes in, we see that we are now part of a suicide pact that will grind down the wealth of the world in order to protect the largest banks and the politicians and parties in power. As the news comes in from Greece, we start to grasp how small a country has to be to be too big to fail. The Gross National Product (GNP) of Greece is smaller than the GNP of Dallas-Ft. Worth. Their government employees retire at 53. They get two months of salary each year as a bonus. They cannot be fired (it is written into the constitution). The government is so inept that it cannot count its employees and tax evasion is so widespread that the government has basically stopped chasing down people. We did the bailouts, we are suggesting financial reform (again faux) in the interest—not of the people—but in the interest of the largest banks.

If we do not turn from our wicked ways, then there is a bad moon rising.

Tags: Capitalism

	Follow The Leaky Bucket via RSS
	Follow responses to this entry via RSS