August 25, 2008

Less than three months from now either Obama or McCain will be the president-elect.  Should we be concerned?  Not whatsoever.  Here’s why:  

A government too big to fail  

We have an aging population.  More people will be claiming entitlement benefits.  Will taxes be raised?  Benefits cut?  The programs abolished?  Then there are insolvent and semi-insolvent banks.  Let them fail or bail them out?  Banks have money.  Bankers are politicians’ friends – can’t let their friends down.  Problems stacked on problems too numerous to count, all requiring government’s officious attention and an infinite bankroll to fund it.  Will these stalwart men be stymied?  No.  

Neither candidate has shown the ability to pass Econ 101, but so what, they don’t need to.  The government, as the possessor of weapons able to wipe out all human life, as the owner of every American’s income, as the country’s sole legal counterfeiter, is above all laws, including economic law.  Government makes its own reality, and all we have to do is believe to have everlasting life.  Besides, it’s been thumbing its nose at economics since the first settlers arrived.  The real action is politics.   Why mess around producing and trading if you can get control of the political machinery of confiscation, intimidation, propaganda, and war?  

If you’re president, you can issue pen-stroke decrees and shape the populace like so much moist mud.  Franklin Roosevelt did.  He saved capitalism with his New Deal, and when that failed, he saved it again with his second New Deal.   He saved it a third time with the Second World War.  That’s why the effete educated remember him as our savior.  War with conscription is an effective way to fight unemployment, especially when the military cooperates by issuing shoddy gear to the troops.  Besides, war hammers home the spirit of nationalism in young males, cleansing them of any illusions of individualism – for the ones who survive, of course.  War creates jobs and great wealth, as witness any country after a bombing campaign -- the country doing the bombing, that is.  The part that makes the bombs, at least, as long as they’re not bombed in return. 

Unfortunately, there’s a downside even to war.   Dead men pay no income taxes.  And wounded men eat up precious government booty.  If war kills off or incapacitates too many, the government’s revenue stream is threatened.  That’s blasphemy, beyond treason.  The new pres will have Big Plans, Really Big Plans, calling for Mucho Moolah.  The loot has to come from somewhere, and raising taxes is always chancy.   So he picks up the phone.  “Hello, Ben?  We’ve got some great deals on Treasury bills today.  How about buying a few billion? . . .  That’s right, the sale will run from now until . . . uh, let’s just leave it at that.  How’s your supply of ink?”  This is Political Reality 101, and McBama helped write the textbook for it.  

Fully-certified candidates  

It’s pointless to look at their campaign platforms.  They’re made up of words, and words to a politician are like drops of water on a hot skillet – they sizzle, then they’re gone.  We know a priori both candidates are certified, homogenized, lobotomized statists, otherwise they wouldn’t be the two contenders.  Both Obama and McCain have been duly vetted by the Council on Foreign Relations.  Both have passed muster with AIPAC.  Both, generally, are faithful to the pillars of the American warfare-welfare state, as encoded somewhere in the country’s founding documents.   

Whatever catastrophic blade is hanging over our heads, they will fight it with the tools at hand, all permitted under the legal sieve known as the Constitution: bureaucracy, taxes, war, deception, inflation, surveillance, more bureaucracy, more surveillance, more inflation, etc.  And when none of these do the job, they will decree whatever state of affairs they want, as noted before.  These are time-tested, well-honed tools, and they must work or politicians wouldn’t keep using them.  

The key word is intervention.  It’s their mantra.  The state will not permit any human to breathe free of interference.  Imagine for a moment the consequences if it did.  The Robber Barons would ride again, just as they did in the 19^th Century.  The ruthless rich made out gloriously, but your average guy was a slave to the work ethic, paid a pittance and treated like a farm animal.  I know, because I read it in my high school history book.  Today, by contrast, we have a people’s democracy, not to be confused with a people’s republic, a Marxist euphemism.  We’re the real thing.  The rich no longer rule – check the net worth of members of Congress and both candidates.  The common man is the god before whom elected officials grovel, especially when the commoners are members of a lucrative PAC.  And politicians certainly can’t serve the masses without colossal intervention.  That’s why we won’t hear any Ron Paul radicalism about abolishing the Fed, or abolishing the income tax, or for God’s sake, abolishing the Department of Education.  

Where would we be if such a nightmare scenario came to pass?