Saturday, September 20, 2008

Devils, Fools and the Bogeyman, Tres

Watching a TV re-run last night (La Femme Nikita, episode "Adrian's Garden", 1998), a character remarked,
"The Dark Ages were a thousand years of chaos and war and famine and disease.
You think we can't have another Dark Ages just because we have
computers, jet planes and cellular phones? Think again."
Unfortunately, I agree. That is where we are headed, driven by the false philosophies of altruism and pragmatism, in the hands of statists.

Many, in and out of government, including a lot of politicians and some pundits (can someone either get Bill O'Reilly an education in free-market economics or a one-way ticket to a Soviet Gulag?), are now calling for more regulation of the banking industry and want to go after the CEOs en masse. Devils and fools, going after the bogeymen -- while government gets a free pass. Remember: Smoot-Hawley deepened the Great Depression, it didn't relieve it.

Virtually everything the government is doing right now is the exact opposite of what is needed to solve the banking crisis, including the rescue of Fannie and Freddie, the two central culprits that brought us to this point, via the Community Re-investment Act, which "encouraged" banks to make bad loans to unqualified borrowers. (See Yaron Brook's excellent analysis in Forbes, "The Government Did It", http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/07/18/fannie-freddie-regulation-oped-cx_yb_0718brook.html)

Now we have the spectacle of the government printing massive amounts of money out of thin air to "stem" the crisis, like putting a welded steel plug on the exhaust vent of an out-of-control nuclear reactor.

As Ayn Rand used to say, "A is A" (see Atlas Shrugged). Down the road, we might be looking at a world-wide depression. I don't know if it will be 1, 5, or 20 years, but reality catches up with unreality, eventually. A is A.

On principle government is the beginning, middle and end of the problem, not the "greedy speculators", "greedy CEOs", "greedy oil companies" and "greedy bankers", as McBama are saying.

The only real solution is, in the words of the 17th century manufacturer Legendre, when asked what the government could do to help industry, "laissez nous faire!" Or, in the vernacular of Rand's hero John Galt, "Get the hell out of my way!"