Blogs For Victory

Hadn’t even thought of that – this is our first recession with the Boomers in full charge of our nation:

If anyone wished to know what the baby-boomer generation would do when, in its full maturity, it hit its first self-created, big-time recession, I think we are seeing the hysterical results. After two decades of unprecedented economic growth, rampant consumer spending, and unimaginable borrowing to satisfy our insatiable appetites, we are suddenly going into even larger debt and printing trillions of dollars in paper money to ensure that someone else after we are gone pays the debt. As if the permanent solution to a financial panic and years of spending wealth we didn’t create were a government take-over of the economy in the manner we currently witness in Spain, Italy, and Greece—or the high-tax, high-spend ethos of a bankrupt California.

The reaction to the economic panic was sort of analogous to the call to ‘charge it!’ after 9/11 (cf. Ike’s fights about the surtax to pay for Korea), or to the Iraq 2006 upsurge in violence, when suddenly our leaders declared the war lost, blamed the nebulous “they” for tricking them into voting for the war, and calling for immediate withdrawals and retreats. Ditto the Stalag-Gulag Guantanamo that, by January 19, had ruined the Constitution, shredded the Bill of Rights, and forever tarnished our reputation. Yet, on the 20th, it was suddenly complex and problematic, and required a “task force” to do a year-long inquiry into the bad and worse choices confronting us. At some point in all this serial hysteria, we are beginning to see the problem is not in the stars of the economy or of the war, but in ourselves—a weird generation that, when it finally came of age, proved to be just about what we could expect of it from what we saw in its youth.

Whom are we bailing out? In large measure, we are bailing out middle-aged Baby Boomers who have essentially been in charge of messing up the nation since about 1964. They can’t get anything right, and lacking any sense of proportion, they went on a binge of borrowing and spending and now that the bill has come due – and Mom and Dad no longer being able to bail them out – they simply want the government to cover for their error.

The reason I’m really on the “sobriety and solidarity” kick is because we do need to pay the price of our foolishness and learn our lesson well. We can’t borrow and spend our way to wealth. We can’t have a great economy if we don’t grown, mine and make things (sorry, environmentalists, but we will need to cut some things down and dig some things up – and then turn said things into products people want). Usury might be good for a short bit, but the reason God warned us off it was because its both predatory and stupid. We can’t farm out child-rearing to schools and day care centers. We can’t all live like kings. It is high time we grew up.

Our liberals are great at showing their solidarity with others – but the problem is they are just showing, they are not being. We need to be in solidarity with each other – and we need to be sober about what we do. Being in solidarity with our fellows doesn’t mean going to a demonstration or making a donation – it means actually going out there and doing for others, at no thought to the cost to ourselves and with not only no expectation of reward, but a downright insistence on not being rewarded.

75 or so years ago FDR and the liberals of the day said we can have it all – we can take time off and still be rich. All it took was fiat money, high interest rates and government spending as much as it could. For a while there, it seemed to work – but even when it was apparently working, this was the residual effect of the hard work still being done and the economic rationality still remaining from the pre-New Deal economy. We’ve been scammed – or, more accurately, we scammed ourselves. We wanted to believe that we could have it all, because believing such a thing is far easier than the difficult task of actually doing something for others. Its all come smashing down, and it won’t get genuinely better until we, as a people, take full responsibility for our errors and insist upon doing the right thing from now on.