I am becoming used to reading 16 impossible things before breakfast -- the nationalization of AIG, the death of Wall Street, the de facto nationalization of the banking system, the ruination of health insurers, the demonization of business, the subsidization of impracticable energy schemes, the doubling of the deficit, the piling on of investment-killing taxes, government watering stock in a manner pioneered by the Robber Barons -- on and on, one idiotic repeat after another of the Great Depression Follies.
What I cannot get used to is the screams of economic freedom as it is roughly kicked with those oh-so-hip Nazi-era socialist jackboots administering the weekly stimulus, with the masses supplying the power. I can't stand to see the United States of America behaving like some national socialistic dictatorship.
We are awash in credit, and yet the so-called "credit freeze" continues. Why? Because business cannot be conducted under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Today, the new business powers are likely to be politician/lawyers or "community organizers" lacking any significant experience in business, who cares nothing about investors, business or solvency, who are completely lacking in accountability to customers or shareholders or employees -- and for all that, who possess seemingly unlimited checkwriting, regulatory and taxing power.
Nobody will dispute that Bammo, Geithner and Nanky are smart. Thing is, nobody is smart enough to run an economy from the White House. (At least that's what I took away from the collapse of the Soviet Union.) But smart people can be power-mad.
The spectacle of businessmen asking for audiences with The Great Obama to ask for mercy is degrading, a throwback to feudal times. Yes, that's what "O'Change" has brought us -- a supplicant economy where obsequious begging to government officials replaces individual effort, can-do-it-iveness and creativity.
The survivors give the powerful their tribute. Jamie Dimon's fawning cheerleading for whatever Obama and his men are proposing to do this week is not just ugly -- it's lewd in a way that makes me want to avert my eyes from the screen.
My prediction: The economy will not get better until we throw the bums out. The problem is, lovers of economic freedom will need to be doing some serious reexamining of assumptions. We'll have to look deep to find out what went wrong, and we'll have to fix it. As for me, I will be reading my hero, Ben Franklin. I own a 10-volume set of his writings. Last night I picked up one of his essays at random; it said that people were depressed about the economic situation, but wouldn't it be better to focus on the positive. His advice seems apt, and I am sure that many such examples exist even in these dark days.
