Lets Be Serious Mr President - Road to the Middle Class

IT’S sometimes hard to remember, but governments are instituted among men for serious reasons. The principal reasons are to secure peace at home and abroad and provide a platform for people to go about their daily lives and earn a living.

In the modern era, that means a functioning credit system. As long as the credit system is sound, then everything else will fall into place.

So when the Obama administration put off the announcement of Bank Bailout Part II, to clear the decks for Senate passage of the so-called stimulus bill, you could say that it demonstrated as clearly as can be where its priorities lie.

First of all we service the Democratic faithful with a trillion dollar bonus. Then we fix the economy. Thanks, Mr. President.

Mr. President: I am sorry to say this, but you are wrong. You are making a terrible mistake.

The only thing that is important right now is to finish the business of righting the credit system, to recapitalize the banks and to do something about the toxic debt. That’s what you need to restore confidence in the banks, and get the economy moving again.

But that’s not what the Obama administration has elected to do. And it speaks volumes.

There’s a lot of political hot air venting right now about bankers dealing themselves big bonuses. Although it is small potatoes, it is scandalous. What we have seen in the last year is that the big beasts of Wall Sreet aren’t as big and aren’t as smart as they thought. There’s a simple reason for this. The credit system is not a glorious triumph of the capitalist system. Not at all.

The credit system is a government program, and has been ever since the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

What does that mean? It means that the government is responsible for the monetary and credit system, and the bankers are just subaltern clerks. It’s the government that mucked up the credit system with its foolish idea that it could shovel credit at low-income homeowners without creating an economy-wide housing bubble. Now it’s the government that must clean up the mess it made.

The fact that the bankers thought it was time to hand out bonuses shows how dumb they really are.

OK, so the bankers are dumb. But the Obama administration is dumber. It would rather focus on increasing Medicaid grants to the states, and building important universities and a thousand other pet projects than fixing the credit system that it broke with its Fannie Freddie catastrophe.

I can’t say that I’m disappointed. I am getting exactly what I hoped for when I voted for Obama.

I felt that it was time for a change from the seriousness of the Bush Administration. Democracy, we know, is the system where the people get what they want: good and hard. And what the people need right now is a four-year demonstration of the unserious nature of the today’s liberal Democratic oligarchy.

It looks like we are going to get just what the doctor ordered.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

Comments:

Posted by: David Bligh on 02/09/09 2:11pm

YOU VOTED FOR OBAMA??????

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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