Ken Lay And Jeff Skilling Good Riddance To Bad Rubbish - Road to the Middle Class

THAT IS A BRITISH colloqualism, if you were wondering, and that is what capitalist cheerleader Larry Kudlow is saying as he commends the vital work of the Justice Department prosecutors in bringing corporate crooks like Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling to justice—and hopefully to jail.

And, we hope, scaring a million other businessmen who might be tempted. For who is as pure as Caesar’s wife?

I’d say that a major motion picture jail term for major motion picture fraud ought to send a message.

But in the glow of our continuing Reagan economy, now restored after the crisis of confidence in the wake of the Enrons and their frauds, let us not forget, says Kudlow, the nadir of our great US economy.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the murderer’s row of economic morons — LBJ, Nixon, Ford, and Carter — in allegiance with their liberal Keynesian advisors, concocted a socialist policy mix that ultimately led to wealth-destroying big-government stagflation.

Yeah, thanks for nothing, pals. But then came the reign of Ronaldus Magnus, and the US economy “became the envy of the world.”

Since the early 1980s, more than 46 million new jobs have been created, with inflation-adjusted GDP increasing $6.2 trillion, or 120 percent.

And stock prices are up 900 percent since 1980.

There’s a downside to all this, of course. That giant sucking sound you hear is the sound of the blindingly successful US economy sucking workers in from all over the world, and in particular from Mexico, an unhappy land of corruption and incompetence in economic governance.

And there is no excuse, not any more, for economic incompetence. The chaps in Estonia read Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, implemented its policy recommendations, and shortly thereafter became e-Stonia, doubling GDP in a decade.

Of course, they made one little mistake, the silly naifs. They thought that the west had actually implemented Friedman’s ideas. Little did they know, as they implemented a flat tax, that they were the first, after Hong Kong, to try it out!

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

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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

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

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

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

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

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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