Right now we are facing a terrible, but necessary, market adjustment. A free world will not be without its winners and losers.
Both Barack Obama and John McCain are quick to blame “greedy executives,” “self interest,” and “lax regulations.” The solution they propose: more oversight, more bailouts, and more government interference in free markets. Its quite ironic because the Federal Government is running a 419 billion dollar deficit and american taxpayers are liable for 59 trillion dollars of entitlements. Where is the regulation and oversight for the guys who make the rules? You still sure those t-bills are risk-free?
Meanwhile, policy makers fail to realize that government action will merely prolong or worsen the inevitable market adjustment. Taxpayers are now directly responsible for assuming the debts of private institutions and the losses of private shareholders: Bear Stearns, Fannie, and Freddie.
Far more insidious than this, however, is the fact that Americans are still on the hook for today’s Lehman blowup. While the Treasury secretary says the government will not be buying the Lehman assets or assisting in a sale, he did not mention the esoteric fact that the Fed has pumped almost 70 billion new dollars into the economy. But where did this 70 billion dollars come from? It was printed out of thin air, so to speak, released by devaluing the US currency through increased inflation – which means all imported goods from t-shirts to televisions will rise in cost.
Welcome to the (corporate) welfare state – hope you enjoy the next 8 years of it. But I forgot – Obama and McCain aren’t like the rest, right? They are changers and hopers and reformers and mavericks.
With this all star cast in 08, “hope for change” is truly an audacious proposition.
Many on the far left and in the fluffy new age croud decry the dominance of western culture across the globe. We hear words like creative destruction, material-rationalism, malthusean crisis, and exploitation bandied about with no context and little critical thought. While these self labeled cultural critics deify non-western cultural beliefs like collectivism, magical thinking, and ludditism, they are oddly silent on polygamy, misygony, and inter-ethnic hate.
Western culture dominates for a simple reason: Progress is dependent on novelty and it is clear that contemporary western culture produces the most novelty when compared to all other global cultural movements throughout human history. As a cultural movement, the west has driven novelty through laissez faire markets in which value (in the form of both tangible goods and intangible ideas) is freely exchanged, and through socioeconomic freedom to ensure a diversity in a set of free minds. Thus novel ideas and discoveries are developed and exchanged, ultimately creating the “fittest species” in the darwinian global marketplace of culture.
However, in recent years the west has moved away from these values of free minds and free markets. The right attempts to impose judeo-christian values under the guise of western culture when it is really the rise of secularism and rational inquiry that has seperated the west from the rest. In this way the right threatens the freedom of minds. The left on the other hand threatens the free markets under the guise of social benefit, when really it is an embrace of free markets that has created the unprecedented wealth and “middle class” affluence first seen in the west. As the right makes its assault on the minds, the left attacks the market, threatening freedom and destroying our cultural potential for novelty and therefore dominance.
We must return to our cultural values at once, or risk seeing our prosperity destroyed. The only way to do this is to once again embrace free minds and free markets and step out of the way of our collective destiny of accelerating consciousness.
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