How the government lovingly rapes the economy
Gotta love it when an irrational tax system that punishes capital, a hyper-regulatory bureaucratic structure that stifles business growth and efficiency, and a body of economic policies that floods the market with unbacked liquidity while diluting real wealth, all combine to cause one of the worst economic fuckups since the Great Depression. And this becomes even more special when our political leaders and newspaper pundits join together in calling the disaster a failure of "capitalism" and propose as a solution - you guessed it - more government regulation!
We're surrounded by quack doctors prescribing arsenic to clean out the cyanide.
George Reisman gives a concise and to-the-point analysis of this bizarre bastardization of language here:
The Myth that Laissez Faire Is Responsible for Our Present Crisis
"the politico-economic system of the United States today is so far removed from laissez-faire capitalism that it is closer to the system of a police state... the actual responsibility for our financial crisis lies precisely with massive government intervention, above all the intervention of the Federal Reserve System in attempting to create capital out of thin air, in the belief that the mere creation of money and its being made available in the loan market is a substitute for capital created by producing and saving."
Amen to that.
We would do well to remember George Orwell's words to this effect in Politics and the English Language:
"Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts... if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better."
With the election coming up, breaking down to the worst choice between two evils we've seen in my lifetime, I admit that my faith that people "do know better" has failed. Gods help us all.
We're surrounded by quack doctors prescribing arsenic to clean out the cyanide.
George Reisman gives a concise and to-the-point analysis of this bizarre bastardization of language here:
The Myth that Laissez Faire Is Responsible for Our Present Crisis
"the politico-economic system of the United States today is so far removed from laissez-faire capitalism that it is closer to the system of a police state... the actual responsibility for our financial crisis lies precisely with massive government intervention, above all the intervention of the Federal Reserve System in attempting to create capital out of thin air, in the belief that the mere creation of money and its being made available in the loan market is a substitute for capital created by producing and saving."
Amen to that.
We would do well to remember George Orwell's words to this effect in Politics and the English Language:
"Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts... if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better."
With the election coming up, breaking down to the worst choice between two evils we've seen in my lifetime, I admit that my faith that people "do know better" has failed. Gods help us all.