Committing National Suicide

According to the Times of London, the Swiss government is planning to crack down on what appears to be an epidemic of suicide tourism. I'm not familiar with the situation, but I suppose people from less enlightened countries, in need of ending their lives, can visit that alpine paradise to get the deed done.

We in the United States, however, needn't worry about raising the air fare from our shrunken pocketbooks. We are in the midst of committing national suicide. I know, know, people have been predicting the end of American civilization as we know it since the New Deal, or perhaps since the Wilson administration. This time the doomsayers maybe on to something, though.

We have adopted a perverse variant of Keynesian economic theory, whereby we run large budget deficits in the good years, and gigantic ones in the bad years. At the same time, economists, or at least those who would be heard, have divorced their theories from any concept of a balance sheet, taking shelter in their particular ideologies. This condition guarantees that the American economy will sooner or later come to a full stop, and to the day when we can no longer find buyers for our debt. Our only alternative to social, economic, and political chaos will be to print money willy nilly, touching off inflation on a scale that will dwarf that of the 1970s. At that point the American emperor, whose "full faith and credit" have been the gold standard, will be shown to have no clothes, and will become the "sick man", just as once the Ottoman Empire did, as it faded away.