Wednesday 7 January 2009

The Economy Must Be Going Down... So To Speak

There are times in the life of a sad pathetic blogger when the Muse of Blog Inspiration takes pity and tosses them something like this...

P0RN INDUSTRY SEEKS FEDERAL BAILOUT

Now I could use sleazy innuendo and double entendres and go on about how the industry should be used to things going up and down, or how it's used to being either hard up, or in the hole, but I won't, because I'm classy.

Now while I suspect this is one of Flynt's little flights of large scale mischief making and overall shit-disturbing, but like the best mischief it does make a point.

Right now governments all over the world are acting like they have the ability to somehow insure people against their own stupidity, greed, and just plain bad luck. This carries with it a very serious and real hazard of making things truly worse.

Because the potential for failure is one of the key ingredients in socio-political-economic evolution. It's what makes people be careful, learn lessons, and hopefully not make the same mistakes twice.

Take that away, replace it with a government willing to dole out cash to cover up that you bought a house you couldn't afford with a mortgage (& a home equity loan for that plasma screen) from a bank run by a crook, backed by financial instruments so confusing and convoluted Stephen Hawking looks at them and has his voice-computer say "What the fuck?" and you'll have people never learning their lessons.

It's like all those safety regulations they now enforce on kids these days. When I compare my childhood to the lives of modern kids, it looks like I grew up on some hard-scrabble Lord of the Flies frontier of deadly dangers and violent anarchy, and not the peaceful suburbs of a small town. Are kids safer because of all these new rules and concerns, not really, they're getting fatter, know less about survival, and are now even more prone for accidents than my generation was at that age. That's because we knew that falling off a cliff would hurt, extrapolating the data learn from the time we fell off the tree without a helmet and enough body armour to fight a war in. Now folks are proposing to do what they did to today's children, to all of society.

I disagreed with the way the mortgage bailout was handled, giving the money directly to the banks was a stupid decision by the Treasury. They should have bought the mortgages outright, renegotiated the terms with the homeowners, and eliminated marked to market accounting, and those overly complicated securities schemes. Because the bulk of the mortgages would be repaid, refilling the Treasury, people would keep their houses, the banks could stay liquid not be forced into paper-bankruptcy because of the jittery market, and reopen a more secure credit market based on sound financial principals, not screw-everyone get-rich-then-broke schemes.

But no one in Washington seems to listen to me.

2 comments:

  1. Holy Hogs in a pigsty! My very own Father pretty much summed it up just like you!

    Imagine that, an old fart and probably the rest of his like think about the same way in this concern. Damn shame they don't have a lick of control of the rampaging politics now because they only -and always- just react. Not act on what they say.

    I personal have no idea -realistically- in how to solve these problems. Outside of dragging them all out and waste more tax dollars in ammunition, gasoline and shovels. But that's not very realist is it..?

    Someone noted that America was Fucked when 'Sir' & 'Ma'am' was stopped being used. Fifty+ years of democrude FUBARs was the setup and obamarama is the road right off the cliff.

    I expect crack dens off behind the White house by 2011 and ragheads burning cars thru-out the lands by 2012 like now over in france.

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  2. Okay, I'm not the type to censor comments, but I must ask folks that when the do comment, they try to use some manners and avoid using terms designed only to offend.

    I live in Canada and there's an entire government department dedicated to prosecuting people with websites over obnoxious comments written by others, and I'm not able to drop half a million dollars on lawyers right now.

    Plus, leave a name. If you can't claim ownership of the comment, even under a pseudonym, then don't make it.

    I consider such etiquette the online equivalent of "Sir and Ma'am" if you please.

    ReplyDelete