Sailing Toward The New Year On Brain Death And A Prayer

I hear tell that talker Glen Beck has a book out called “Arguing With Idiots.” Who exactly are the idiots? Are they the Democrats, who have their big chance (finally)? They will build the social welfare state, even if it's upon the wreckage of the country. They think tax revenue is the engine that can run this state. But they are wrong. It's production. The essence of the social welfare state is understanding how much money you can suck out of productive people, without killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. The goose, however, is dead. We sucked it dead without ever getting our welfare state. This means that the Democrats have no ideas that will work; their ideas will finish bringing the country to its knees. The country lacks that one thing that every politician and government worker craves – money for their programs.

The Republicans, of course, are certain that unleashing the free market will generate the entrepreneurial creativity that will raise the US back up where it belongs (and where it presumably was under the sainted Ronald Reagan). That's pretty funny. We spent eight years with the G. W. Bush administration, unleashing the free market (except when we were giving some important firm a sweet heart deal). Those free marketeers sold all the crap they could invent to us cleaver 'mericans, then took the money and ran. They ran to their local Ferrari dealers with their ill gotten bonus checks in hand, they ran away under a cover of plausible deniability for any culpability in the financial disaster (“you've got nothing on me,” “you can't prove a thing,” “Geithner knew about it, so it must be OK”). You say you want to rebuild the US industrial capacity? “That smacks of industrial policy. Bad, bad, bad”

The Libertarians? Very funny. What was that? Libertarians? Did you say something?

The emergency is NOW; the people who claim to be working on our behalf in the government were clear witnesses to the building disaster. Remember – the Roman Empire didn't realize that it had fallen. The British Empire was toast a good fifteen years or more before finally realizing what had happened.

Is anyone in our government THINKING in between bouts of telling us how much they are going to do for us, and how much they are going to giver us? I know, those Harvard and Princeton guys running the government aren't the idiots. I must be one. Gotta go.