KA-POW! #7 - Bonner

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Bill Bonner for “Merkel Joins the Fool’s Parade” :

One thing Americans take for granted is that they will always be the richest, most successful people on earth. They think that because that is what they have always known. The US economy became the biggest in the world before 1900. Americans had just what it took to become the richest people on the planet. They worked hard. They saved their money. They had little government interference. They had the industrial revolution at their backs…and nothing in their way. And they had a dollar that was ‘as good as gold.’ By the time the baby boomers were born the US had such a big lead over the rest of the world, it seemed like nothing could stop it. Free enterprise guaranteed new innovations and new wealth. Democracy guaranteed a political system that would adapt to the needs of the evolving economy.

But nothing lasts forever. As it matured, the US economy and its political system became more and more rigid and more and more costly, with handouts and bailouts - at every level. Large companies are protected. Millions of people are encouraged not to work. The whole financial industry is dipped in honey. And the whole population is urged not to save, but to spend. Why bother to save for retirement; there’s Social Security. Why bother to save for health care emergencies; there’s the government’s new overhaul of the medical system! Why bother to save at all; the government has fixed short-term rates so low you get nothing for your trouble.

...

“Ya…you Anglo-Saxon economists are ruining the world,” he would say. Kurt [Richebächer] had no truck with Keynesianism. Or monetarism. Or any other of the fads in economics. Besides, he had lived through Germany’s hyperinflation, the rise of National Socialism, WWII, partition, and finally, reunion. He knew that there were no free lunches, no easy fixes, and no panaceas. He knew too that people who promised miracles were dangerous frauds. Wealth is created by work, saving, innovation, investment, and perseverance. There are no miracles. No short cuts.

While wealth is created by work and saving, it is destroyed by consumption and debt. When you borrow money, you have to pay it back. Then, you must draw down your wealth, reduce your living standard, and cut into the capital you laid away in years past. You can try to squirm and dodge, but you just make the situation worse.

Honorable mention goes to Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. for “The Government's Campaign: Kahlúa Kills” :

The world has an impression of the United States as a freewheeling, hard-drinking country where few things are regulated. The world should wake up to the reality that the United States is governed by a totalitarian bureaucracy that claims to manage every aspect of our lives, which means of course managing the economy with massive regulatory intervention, of which the following is but a tiny example.

...

The harassment comes following a campaign by state attorneys general demanding that something be done to stop the "youth" from drinking these beverages [mixing alcohol and caffeine]. Ah, yes, it is always the youth. ...

... It has something to do with safety, so they say.

But can we believe this? Government is the institution that builds and manages the roads on which tens of thousands of people die every year. Government is the institution that starts the wars that have killed tens of millions of people. They not only send people to be killed in foreign lands, but actively recruit the youth into this "job," bribing them with free education that they can enjoy if they happen to emerge alive and not brain-damaged at the end of their indentured servitude. Government is the institution prepared to beat you and shock you with electricity, and put you in a dirty cage, if you do not comply with its arbitrary demands.

Can we really believe that the FDA bureaucrats are worried about our health and well-being? That these lifetime looters of the taxpayer are fretting about our intake of caffeine and liquor and are seeking to do what is best for us, like overbearing parents or pastors of the local fundamental congregation? I seriously doubt it.