I never liked the politics of David Lloyd George, the PM of England during WWI, but he left us one very astute piece of advice: "Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated; you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps."

You may recall I mentioned the election as being your one chance to communicate with the world, and especially to get in contact with others who are dismayed by the current state of politics in America. That may not have made much sense to you, but it's the number one most important reason you are not 'Wasting your vote' when you vote for a 'Third Party'.

What makes the LP or any other competing party 'Third' anyway? Isn't it a little presumptuous to implicitly declare the Dems and Reps 'First' or 'Second'? They aren't, historically. The first two national parties to become significant in the Federal government under the Constitution were the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. Neither are with us today, at least in their original incarnations. Today's Democratic Party did evolve out of one faction of the Democratic-Republicans, but they were, from the start, a decidedly different party The Republicans sometimes try to also claim the D-Rs in their ancestry, but ultimately, neither is the party of Jefferson.

So if the Two Camps weren't the first and second big parties to come along, which would make the next big one 'Third', then the term must mean something other than order of creation.

The only other choice I can see is that the term 'Third Party' comes from an assumption. People use the term because they think of the Two Camps as a permanent institution, fundamental to our nation, and therefore any other competition is automatically no more than a distant third place.

Nobody got together and agreed to this practice. It's just a habit, born out of conventional wisdom and built into our national psyche. Still, the constant reinforcement is as effective as brainwashing, preventing voters across the country from straying out of party lines.

What does it say to people, when we talk about a 'Third Party'? If a party is 'Third', it suggests that it won't be able to do anything. It won't seat any representatives, it won't get mentioned on the news, it will be just so much wasted effort. It's the hapless bronze medal standing on the lowest platform, listening as someone else's anthem plays. The second place winner made the winner sweat, nearly won, got his attention. The third place was never in mind.

Absolute, total nonsense. At the founding of the Republican Party, it did not instantly step into second place. The Two Camps by that time were the Whigs and the Democratic Party. The Republicans were a 'Third Party' up until the decade before the Civil War, when they stepped up to fill a void left by the Whigs who were disintegrating over the slavery issue. Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of the US, was the first Republican to hold the office. Only five of the previous fifteen were from the Democratic party.

Remember my David Lloyd George quote? For me to quote the man, I must have had a really good reason, because I seriously don't like what he stood for. And I do have a good reason:

The Libertarian Party and other competing parties look risky to the average voter, a choice far less comfortable than the Reps and Dems. Many people out there admit that neither party represents what they would like to have for a government, but they settle for whichever party moves them a little closer to their vision of the right way.

That is their first of two small jumps. That's their quick way to the bottom of the canyon. By voting for someone who does not accurately or even closely resemble their beliefs, they effectively tell the world they want the US to do things in a way they do not in reality approve of. They appear to the world as someone who agrees with everything the candidate represents.

If you have a vision of your ideal US, you should vote for the candidate who most closely represents that vision, no matter how slight his or her chances of winning. That's the big step that gets your vision on record. The more who do so, the bigger the 'Third' party vote becomes, and the less claim the Two Camps have to being 'First' and 'Second' .

Voting for a 'First' or 'Second' who don't represent your beliefs causes you to drop out of sight into the abyss.

So who do you vote for, if you want the Federal Government to stop growing, stop soaking up tax money while simultaneously building debt? Right now, people who think it's important vote for the party that gives it more lip service, the Republicans.

But, ever since Nixon began the process of building the deficit and piling on to the National Debt, it has grown under every Republican president, and it grew more under these than under the Democratic administrations. Not saying the Dems don't share responsibility; they were in control of Congress through most of this time. But a Republican president has signed most of these budgets into law, and Democrats have not enjoyed a filibuster-proof Senate during any Republican administration in this period. Worse, when the Republicans did have control of congress, they only controlled themselves by grid-locking with a Democratic president. They were trying everything they could do to cut the tax rates instead of paying down the debt, an absolutely irrational position for any politician supporting fiscal responsibility.

Personally, I suspect the last Republican president who actually believed in a small government was Herbert Hoover, although Eisenhower was getting there toward the end of his administration. Considering them according to their actions rather than their words, I cannot see Nixon, Reagan or either Bush as having done any more than paying lip-service to Fiscal Conservatism. The concept simply doesn't match up with their record. Ford never really had a chance to show his colors, presiding over a crippled economy and a crippled government, so I just leave him out of the discussion.

What's that? You think Lyndon Johnson is at fault for our broken borrow-and-spend system? Maybe he bears responsibility for some of the 'and-spend' part, but he left Nixon with a balanced budget. Nixon's the one that kept Johnson's programs and war alive but didn't collect sufficient taxes to pay for them. If he'd been a real fiscal conservative, he would have found a way to slow down the spending or push Congress to raise taxes to pay for their precious programs. Borrowing for any purpose other than investing the money in a profit-making enterprise is never, ever fiscal responsibility.

Frankly, I don't see the current Republican candidate showing any chance of bucking the trend and going back to true Fiscal Conservatism. I might have believed it before this campaign, but when he abandoned the middle and courted the same quasi-right voters courted by every Republican from Reagan onward, that told me that he is ready to play the same old power games rather than do the right thing.

If a politician talks about all sorts of programs that are going fix the world for you, and then tells you he's going to cut taxes too, then he is not under any rational definition of the word a Fiscal Conservative. A bona-fide Fiscal Conservative is first and foremost concerned with eliminating the deficit, preferably by eliminating spending, and then with applying the resulting surplus to paying down the debt.

Once the debt is gone, he should be concerned with abolishing it via a balanced budget amendment.

Do either of the candidates speak of this in their platforms? No. They speak of being fiscally conservative, but don't dwell on it, or even offer a definition of what they mean. And as Bill Clinton taught us all, words are very tricky things to define.

Good luck to all of us on Tuesday. Make sure to come back here and begin planning with me for 2012. We need to get work on it right now if we hope to effect a change we really do need.

 

The thing about being a Libertarian is, when someone steals your yard sign, you don't know who to blame, the Republicans or the Democrats. But it did make me feel good to think that at least one of them sees us as a threat.

I try not to brag on my kids, but they make it difficult. Anyway, it's actually on topic this time, so bear with me.

I have a couple of very talented young musicians in the house. The elder is a double bass player (who also plays piano and electric bass guitar). He is hard at work this year (as a high school senior) preparing to apply to various and sundry good music schools with an eye on getting a performance degree. We're very proud of him.

Every year, his school district holds what they call the 'String Fest', a concert featuring one or two numbers from the leading orchestras of the various schools in the district with music programs. They march through the elementary schoolers, to the middle schoolers, and finally end up with my son's orchestra, the top orchestra in the Fine Arts magnet for the district. It's a real treat if for those of us who enjoy watching kids doing their best with fine music.

I've always, from the first year my eldest began playing, enjoyed sitting through the whole concert, watching first year students fumble their way through 'Mary had a little lamb' all the way up to the Honors magnet orchestra performing pieces out of the professional repertoire. (Sadly, they start with second year students now. They used to have the beginners.) And I've always been disturbed to watch the parents of younger kids jump up and grab their kids as soon as their orchestra finished, rapidly thinning the audience so that the littlest ones played to a packed house.and the finest musicians played only to their own parents (and one or two others like me.)

Now that my son is in that top orchestra, it began irking me more. Last week, we had that concert. Watching these people leaving with their kids, I fought the urge to jump up, grab them and yell, "Sit back down! I watched your kid! Stick around and watch mine!"

And of course the thought occurred to me once again, "If it were me running this thing, their kids would be required to stay and watch the whole concert, like the oldest kids have to do! It would be good for them!"

Then it hit me. How incredibly un-Libertarian. After all, I wasn't watching their kids as a responsibility, I was doing it because I love watching the little guys doing something so well, something they've put so much effort into. I'm watching for the same reason people like watching the kids who they bring in on 'Dancing with the Stars'. It makes you feel good about the future, to know kids like these will be around to look after it.

We, every single one of us, have at some point thought "If I were in charge, things would be done right!" The 'if I ruled the world' moment is as human as it gets. Only, we almost always think of what we would make the rest of the world do.

So do the people we actually do put in charge. They think about what they're going to make the rest of us do.

I read through the Democratic and Republican party platforms last night. I try to do this once in a while, although I'm not quite sure why. It's an exercise in futility.

The Dems were crying their hearts out over the many many unfairly disadvantaged of our nation, and blaming it all on the President and his buddies. It seems an awful lot of people need to learn how to do things the right way, and an awful lot of corporations need to change their ways and do things the right way, and their solution? Tax breaks and spending and more tax breaks and more spending.

Oh, and by the way, they're going to be fiscally responsible.

The Reps were very defensive about everything they've done and ever scornful of Democratic opposition to their policies and accomplishments. They ended several of their sections with a position that, when stripped of clever language, basically promised nothing except, "We will steadfastly oppose Democratic attempts to oppose us." I wonder if they know how ironic that is.

Then they spent a very long time detailing the world, area by area, in many cases country by country, and how those people needed to do things differently, and how the United States ought to be making sure they do things differently. And then they talked about how corporations were all hamstrung by the Democrats and unable to do the right thing like they would if they only could, and how the Republicans were going to fix this.

How? Tax breaks and spending and more tax breaks and more spending.

Oh, and by the way, they're going to be fiscally responsible.

If I hadn't needed to wake up for church this morning, I think I would have broke into that bottle of tequila in the cupboard. I really needed a drink. I managed to rise above the urge, but it wasn't easy.

 

I feel a little guilty that I haven't responded to any comments on my last entry, yet I'm back with another. Sorry, but I've been a little under the weather. Same excuse for the long delay between posts. Thanks everyone who has emailed, rated, or commented. I'll reply individually as soon as I catch up some.

One of my all-time favorite political quotes is from Plato: "Those too smart to participate in politics are punished by being governed by those less intelligent than themselves."

My plan for this blog is to work my way in a logical fashion through a discussion of Libertarianism (or perhaps through my slightly altered version of it, but I intend to make sure to point out where my views don't match up with the LP platform.) I suppose my last entry logically leads me directly into a discussion of what Libertarianism is and why I think more people should take it seriously, but I think another question needs to be settled even before that:

Why should people take any third party seriously?

The whole 'wasted vote' theory is wrong. I'm talking about the idea that any vote cast for anyone other than the two major parties is the irresponsible waste of your precious voice in the Republic. To my mind, it is a deliberate lie, that I suspect was first made by a Republican during the second George H.W. Bush campaign in an attempt to dissuade Ross Perot supporters. (At least, the first time I ever heard it was in the 1992 campaign, although Dems are equally guilty; they used the same logic on Nader supporters.)

"Deliberate lie"? I assure you I am not being overly harsh. The people who circulated this idea in the first place knew good and well that they were saying something untrue and that is the very definition of a 'lie'. They understood how the American political arithmetic works, and they knew already what I'm about to tell you.

The one and only 'wasted vote' is a vote that is not cast, a voter who fails to go to the polls. A voter who casts his vote, no matter how he casts it, has made good and proper use of it.

In 1992, the Governor of Arkansas won the presidency by gaining a plurality of 43 percent of the vote. How is this possible? Because the incumbent President of the United States was unable to muster more than 37.7 percent (an appalling showing for an incumbent anything.) If we factor out all the people who 'wasted their votes' on Ross Perot, Andre Marrou, Donald Duck, or whomever, the esteemed Bill Clinton actually took 53.3 percent of the vote, which is, in these even-split days, close to a landslide.

The actual 43 percent gained by Clinton was used as an excuse by Republican opponents. I remember how one Republican of my acquaintance put it to me: "The Bill Clinton Presidency is all Ross Perot's fault!"

In his eyes, every single person who voted for Ross would have voted for George 41 if Ross hadn't run. So the 'real' results, in his eyes, were Clinton 43 percent, Bush 56.6 percent.

This is absolute nonsense, in the real world. The last time any president won by that kind of margin was a wildly-popular incumbent Ronald Reagan over a hopelessly incompetent run by Walter Mondale. The last time before that was Nixon over a similarly incompetent McGovern. There is no way that an incumbent with sagging popularity and a poorly-conducted campaign (as the 92 Bush campaign) could have pulled 56.6 percent. What we have, in this failed way of thinking, is wishful thinking combined with denial.

Now let's consider what the 1992 results actually mean. The numbers were Clinton 43 percent, Bush 37.7 percent, Perot 18.9 percent. The other 0.4 percent are mostly the Libertarian (Marrou) .

I contend that a significant number of the voters in the 1992 elections would not have voted for anyone had Ross Perot not pulled them into the process. Before the 1992 elections, the US presidential election had never had even close to 100 million votes cast. In 1992, there were 104.4 million, which exceeded the previous record by 12 million votes! Perot garnered a total of 19.7 million votes. A large chunk of those were disgruntled Republicans. I personally doubt Perot appealed much to typical Democrats, so I'm betting the remainder were the surprise 12 million newbies.

Since then, the 'newbies' have remained in the process, continued to vote once someone got them started, and more new voters have followed them. I give the credit to Mr. Perot. I believe that Mr. Obama is bringing a similar surge in, and we will again see record numbers in 2008.

Had Perot not run one of the weirdest campaigns in history (he actually withdrew from the race at one point, just when he had everything rolling forward) who knows how much of the vote he might have taken. Possibly enough to have changed the results.

It wouldn't have taken much. Let's pick out five states which had the following results: a, Clinton won and b, Perot took at least half as many votes as Clinton. In these five states, let's imagine that somehow Perot attracted twice as many votes as he did, and every other result in the union stayed the same. Or, Perot gets 24.8 million instead of 19.7 million in the popular vote.

California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Wisconsin = 109 electoral votes for Perot.

Now it's only 261 votes for Clinton and 168 votes for Bush. You need 270 electoral votes to win in the Electoral College.

What would have happened after that? Very simply, the Electoral College would have hammered it out. Oh, I know that people say in the EC everyone 'has to vote for the person they were sent there to represent' but the reality is, that's nonsense. It is, at best, a tradition, although a variety of states have relatively untested laws that attempt to force the elector's hand despite what the Constitution says. By Federal law, they can vote for any damned candidate they want.

And the Perot candidates would not have voted for Clinton. Perot electors might have lobbied long and hard for Bush or Clinton supporters to switch to Perot, but my guess is, they would have gone for Bush in the end, because the Perot machine was more Republican than Democratic in philosophy and even if the voters were often independents and traditional non-voters, the electors would have come out of the machinery. Then you would have seen a flurry of attempts by state governments to push the electors this way and that, or get it thrown into the Supreme Court on the basis of various state laws of questionable constitutionality that attempt to dictate the elector's actions or mete out punishments if he or she is 'faithless' to the candidate represented. It would have made the 2000 election and the 'hanging-chad' controversy seem tame. But in my opinion, in the end Bush would have remained president.

All because 24.8 million voters didn't know their place. Didn't know they weren't allowed to draw outside the lines. A mere 5 percent increase in the national vote could have done it. I won't walk you through the numbers, but it would not have required even an additional 10 percent to actually have put Perot in office. Or to have put Clinton in by a popular majority. The balances are just that close, and the 'winner take all' system for apportioning the electoral votes of 48 out of 50 states (of 49 out of 51, since D.C. acts like a state in this case) make it possible to swing results wildly with relatively little adjustment in popular percentages.

You are absolutely not wasting your vote when you cast it for anyone else, no matter how obscure, because your vote becomes part of the percentages. Never forget that.

You cannot vote 'none of the above', except by voting for someone else. Vote for yourself. Vote for the man in the moon. But don't skip on the trip to the polls. The more disgruntled voters that actually show up at the polls, the harder the acid burns in the stomachs of the power brokers who would prefer you stay home and waste your vote.

Okay, this discussion actually has another half to it. The half that explains why, if you are voting for someone you think 'has no chance' you are still doing something our country desperately needs many more of its people to do. The other half needs to come after I discuss a couple other points, so I'm going to draw this post to a close. So just take the following point with you as you leave for the day. It's sort of a preview of the other half of this discussion:

Your vote, regardless of who it is cast for, is your one and only direct communication to the power brokers, to the politicians, to the elected officials, and more than that...

Your vote, regardless of who it is cast for, is your one and only chance to get in contact with everyone else who may, just like you, equally feel that your government is not doing things the way its people expect. If you don't cast it, you are invisible to everyone else who is equally dismayed by their choices. They may also be failing to vote because they don't know how many more like them are out there. You are 0 percent, 0 votes. If you do cast it, you are now 1 vote more. If a thousand of you cast it, you are a thousand votes more. And if a million of you cast it, you are now a subject of discussion on CNN or Fox News. You begin to be heard.

Perot supporters were beginning to be heard in 1992. If the Reform Party hadn't had a complete meltdown in the fight for power once Perot exited the scene, it might have mattered quite a bit in subsequent elections. The US military might not be tied up in Iraq, facing a crisis of international law because the UN agreement that gives them legal standing is about to expire and the government they installed has yet to authorize their presence. The international financial system might not be in total disarray because of not merely lack of regulation but effective collusion on the part of American bank regulators which allowed a financing speculation bubble to grow wildly out of hand. The world might be a dramatically different place today.

We who are dismayed by the Two Camps of America can matter again. If we start now, 20 million votes in 2012 is a real possibility. Frankly, with the right circumstances, the presidency wouldn't be impossible. Perot was closer than most people realize.

 

An old joke among pilots goes, "The key to air safety is to keep your total number of takeoffs in balance with your total number of landings." I find this nugget much the same as the wisdom ricocheting around web pages and news channels lately. Every bit of it seems to be simultaneously sound and useless advice.

At the start of the biggest world wide financial meltdown since 1929, my retirement accounts contained investments of a risk level appropriate for a man nearing fifty, and for years I have been shoveling ten percent of my income into them. I had diversity, even to the extent of managing some of it myself and leaving some of it in the hands of the professionals, and keeping some of it in domestic investments and some in ADRs so that I held foreign investments. Despite all of these things, I have less money saved for my retirement today than I had ten years ago. All of my savings and growth for an entire decade has vanished. No, I did not withdraw any of it, not a single cent. No, I did not stop saving. Simply put, I stood pat, sagely heeding those who counsel 'never sell during a downturn'. If I had transferred all my funds to an insured savings account ten years ago and then used the money I deposited since then to take expensive vacations instead, I would be farther ahead right now.

I feel like the Ant listening to the Grasshopper laugh at me as we shiver in the cold together. This is not the way the story is supposed to go.

Writing a diatribe against the several possible scapegoats would serve no purpose. As frustrating as it is to watch my hopes of retiring at the same age as my father disappear, it isn't your problem, and it isn't in any way special or unique. I brought it up to personalize the anger of the middle-aged and golden aged across this nation and doubtless many others, who are experiencing the same devastation as I. This anger, and not the financial crisis, is the real problem today.

You see, in Washington and its international counterparts, the engines of Big Government are now gearing up to capitalize on this latest surge of anger. I can't tell you what they will do, precisely, because I am not psychic, and the election year complicates the question anyhow, but I can assure you, the process is underway. We are too late to stop it this time around, but unless we want to live through this again, or perhaps even worse than this, we must begin as a nation to understand why doing all the same things we've always done in times of financial crisis will lead to the same long term result, over and over again.

The panic story, already well underway, follows a predictable path. Trouble stirs first in the form of slowing growth, for whatever reason. Inflation saps the value of savings, interest rates slow capital investment, and our leaders see an opportunity to save the day. You will hear the Federal Reserve or the President or others speak of 'levers' such as the Federal discount rate or the reserve requirements, as if the economy is a machine with controls no more complex than an automobile. The specific levers vary from decade to decade, but the result is the same. Natural economic adjustments which will inevitably occur become delayed, creating unintentional results. The effect of those unintentional results gradually accumulate, until the system breaks down and the correction the government tried to forestall happens anyway.

In 2000, toward the end of the Clinton administration, the economy slid downward, thanks to the dragging effect of a global financial crisis which had gradually blossomed overseas over the prior three years and magnified by a collapsing stock bubble. Over the next year, the crisis deepened, as the early Bush administration struggled to find a way to deal with it. Then, over the course of four months, the September 11 attacks and the Enron bankruptcy put the final touches on the collapse.

The Bush administration, even though supposedly staffed by Conservatives, became as activist about managing the economy as any of its predecessors. They decided to use the consumer as their 'lever'. If the consumers would just buy stuff, they reasoned, despite the financial crisis and the growing American military commitment, then companies would show profits, stocks would rise, and the good times would roll once more.

How would the consumers do this in the middle of a financial crisis, with their discretionary income falling and their unemployment rate increasing? By increasing their debts. Through a variety of policies, financial regulators arranged to make sure interest rates remained as low as possible, so that the consumers could borrow the money. Consumers had come out of the nineties already saddled with a serious debt, but the government believed that making it worse would be the best possible plan.

It could work as a short term solution. And they reasoned that as long as the short term wasn't too bad, the American economy would eventually pick up the ball as usual before the short term ended. Presumably, those debts would vanish when the economy hit its stride.

But when money is tight, people get more conservative about it. How could the leadership convince the country to go on a spending spree in the middle of a recession? They couldn't, before September 11, but after it, public anger was ready to channel, and in some cases it had already spilled out into the wrong things, such as attacks on American Muslims and American Sikhs (mistaken for Muslims because of the turbans they wear as a religious duty.)

Rather than let it fester, the government harnessed the patriotic situation to battle the economic situation. Echoing calls for public support during the world wars, appealing to consumers to do without, to plant victory gardens, to gather recyclables and buy war bonds, the Bush Administration told the American people that the most patriotic thing they could do was keep buying stuff. As long as they kept buying, they were supporting the boys overseas and standing proud for flag and country.

Spurred on by the Administration and enticed by ultra-low financing brought about by Federal tinkering, they bought. They purchased cars on zero-percent interest rates, they discovered 'creative' ways to get into houses with mortgages arranged such that they would never be able to pay them off (on the theory that they could sell them later for a profit, thus pocketing the profit and paying off the loan. In other words, the sellers packaged the mortgage as an investment vehicle.) And credit card balances swelled to purchase flat-panel TVs, HDTVs, laptops and more. All while we felt proud to help support American home-builders and retailers.

What a unique call to action. Your sacrifice, as patriotic Americans, shall be to sacrifice nothing.

The idea worked to a certain extent in the short term, but never really to the point of recovering the economy of the nineties. Other events, including a resource-taxing military effort in Iraq and the growth of two very large Asian economies (representing between them nearly half the people on Earth), aligned to keep US growth weak while pushing up the cost of food and fuel through increasing demand.

The short term ended without the good times between crises kicking in. Food and oil prices spiked upward and the economy stopped growing. The bad choices of lending corporations and consumers (remember those impossible-to-pay-off mortgage 'investments'?) began to catch up to them, creating a cascade of failures that has touched off a new global financial crisis. And the current presidential candidates now busy themselves trying to harness public anger over it, trying to pin the blame on each other, or each other's party, or each other's party's latest president. The President and Congress, meanwhile, hammer out a massive rechanneling of tax money into corporate hands to replace the capital lost in those bad choices.

You keep hearing the number '$700 billion'. Please help get the word out; the real size of the bailout is $1 Trillion. The '$700 Billion' is the amount greater than the $300 billion already committed a few months ago to bail out Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae for their woes created in the same crisis via the same bad choices. Where did all this money go? How could $1 Trillion just vanish? The angry consumers want to know. They shake their fist and want change, and intend to get it by voting for the same old parties they always vote for.

The $1 Trillion didn't really vanish, per se. The reality is, it never existed. I might talk more about that at some point in a later article, but let me ask you now to stop following the herd, stop shaking your fists and demanding a fix from the government, and think about something.

Ultimately, this problem had a cause called... ourselves. Perhaps not individually, but as a nation. We spent money we didn't have. When a corporation does this, it's usually good business. Most corporate debt is invested in capital or materials from which it will create a product to sell. This makes sense, and even has a saying to go with it; 'You gotta spend money to make money.' It works because the profits from the sales repay the debt.

Consumers who go into debt to buy a house are arguably still making a sound financial decision, provided they restrict themselves to a mortgage that they can pay off, and buy a house they will be able to sell. As long as these are true, they are spending money to make money, the equity increase in the house as property values rise, and thus, they are still acting responsibly.

But when you buy a car, or a flat-panel TV or a nice vacation with a loan? How much money will you be making on that?

The answer is, none. The item will depreciate until it is valueless, or mostly so. That isn't in itself a problem, though. We buy many consumables in our life, from food, to clothing and fuel and electricity... and some of these are discretionary, like a vacation or an espresso drink. That's part of being alive; if you aren't enjoying yourself once in a while, you're not likely to be enjoying your life.

The problem is, consumables disappear. You must continuously buy more of them. You will always spend a certain percentage of your income on them. But, if you spend money you have not made yet on items where, unlike the investments of corporations and landowners, the purchase will never earn any money to pay back the debt, then you have simply moved a percentage of your future discretionary income into the present. Go into the future, and you find a big hole in your resources called a credit card bill. It does not represent any investment which earns you money, it represents that big TV that just broke.

It also represents that replacement TV that you don't have the money to spend on, because you have a credit card bill to pay, the debt incurred for the original TV now broken plus interest. Of course, you could drive the debt up higher by charging it on your card. And, multiplied across the nation, it represents millions of TVs and whatever else that consumers cannot buy unless they dig a deeper hole for themselves. And that loss of discretionary income leads to an economic downturn, once they hit the point that they either cannot extend their credit farther, or have nothing at all to pay cash with, because their bill is so large.

A fiscally responsible leadership, knowing this, ought not encourage consumers to spend what they don't have, ought not ask them to rob the future to pay the present, as the saying goes. Our government is already addicted to doing the same thing for itself though, so perhaps they just couldn't see it. Or, perhaps they simply hoped some other unknown solution would appear and make up the difference. That being said, I'm still not blaming the current situation on them. They didn't hold the pen that signed the car loan or interest-only mortgage or handed over the credit card. We did.

We let our patriotic fervor be channeled as a 'lever' to control the economy. As a result, we reached the end of our credit limit as a nation, and now we watch the economy shrink. What mistake are we about to be herded into making now, as we demand solutions from the government and they channel our anger into support for whatever theory they wish to try this time around?

As I said, I'm not psychic. But I will tell you this much; if we continue to vent our anger at Washington, if we continue to expect the politicians and financial policy wizards to fix our economy and make everything better, they will continue to do as we ask, and keep experimenting on us. One of the great ironies of our times is that we vote for people who promise to 'keep government out of the way of business' and 'support free enterprise' and 'let the market drive the economy', then we scream at them to meddle and fix the economy the second it doesn't go well.

The Bush Administration did not create the problem. We did. Not by going along with the idea of buying as much as we could to support the economy (and in some way show the terrorists they weren't stopping us) but by demanding a solution from them in the first place.

I will return to the problem above, both in terms of government spending and consumer spending, in later posts. I encourage you to think about the above point, and comment on it so I can clarify anything I didn't explain well. You might call this a setup entry. Go back and read again, if you have the time, because I'm going to build and expand upon several ideas as we move on with this blog. In one way or another, most of the concepts of and reasons for Libertarianism are bundled up together in it, although some of them, mostly the social side of things, are buried pretty deep. Let's just say I want you thinking about it for now. I'll explain why, as we go along.

 

Except for this paragraph, my first post is the same as my original 'Blog Description', but I wanted to put it here as an entry so that I could replace the description with something shorter. To everyone reading, hail and well met. Welcome to my blog, and I look forward to your comments.