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At the time of this writing, the President is preparing to sign the largest spending bill in world history.
The two most appalling things about this bill HR 1, is first, its utter dishonesty—spending tax money on pork projects is not the way to end a government-caused recession—and second, to add insult to injury, no one has actually read the bill. The Congressmen who voted on it did not read it. The President has not read it. The monster is over a thousand pages long, longer than WAR AND PEACE or a Harry Potter novel.
Imagine the outcries from the Greens and Conservation groups if the ecology were handled with the casual contempt used by this Congress to handle the economy.
Imagine some problem, let us say, soil erosion, or the loss of crab fishing the Chesapeake Bay, were handled in this fashion. Instead of actually, you know, investigating the causes of the erosion or the crab depopulation, the state proposes that a flood of organisms shall be imposed into the ecology, redistributed from elsewhere in the ecology: more than half of the animals and plantlife are to be removed from the wetlands, forest and field, and stored in zoos and nurseries, and then replanted and restocked in public parks, in backyards and fallow fields more or less at random, and all done according to some massive document no one has read.
The Secretary of the Treasured Greenery, let us say, when asked about the details of the world-saving plan announces that there is no plan, no details. The greenery will be handed out, not according to any rational account of what makes the ecology go, but according to a checklist of political favors to be paid back, or fashionable political causes. To save the whales, whale herds will be decimates, and the money used to fight venereal disease in Africa or to grow soybeans in greenhouses in Tibet. To halt soil erosion, trees and green cover in runoff areas will be removed to build a stadium or a monorail or a museum of famous gangsters.
Imagine, if you will, a set of balances between capital and labor, wages and costs, prices and interest rates and the stability of the laws of contract and property, as delicate and interconnected as the various balances between predator and prey, herbivores and scavengers and food supply and habitat the conservationist with such good intentions seek not to disturb. Now imagine an Omnibus Captain Planet Super-Hosanna Save-the-Globe Bill which will affect every habitat, almost every organism, in the nation and beyond, introducing new organisms, species and chemicals into the air and water with no forethought as to the possible consequences. Further imagine that no one has read the bill before it is signed into law, so that no one knows what will be done, or what will be changed, or how, or in what magnitude, or when, or why.
When the rabbits of regulation decimate the crops of the Australia of our economy, it will be too late merely to blame Bush.
You might object that real conservation groups do not go out killing wildlife, or dragging herds of cattle from Midwestern prairies to Alaskan tundra. But when you try to ‘save’ the economy by means of state intervention, what you do is tax or burden one group, waste a hefty fraction of the money in bureaucratic overhead, and give payouts or payola to another group, who become government clients thereby.
Going on a mad spending spree when you are hundreds of billions of dollars in debt is a mad idea. ‘Stimulating’ an economy to encourage lending where most people live beyond their means is likewise a mad idea. The source of the wealth of nations is work, intelligently and efficiently applied to achieve some human desire. Work cannot be produced by fiat out of nothing. God Almighty alone can make something out of nothing; all Caesar can do is rob Peter to pay Paul. Going into debt or inflating the currency has the same economic effect as a tax, it is merely a tax that fall more heavily on creditors, and is not apportioned by income or census. The closest thing a government can do to creating wealth by decree is to create the false appearance of wealth temporarily, and this is done by inflating currency or devaluing coinage, or some other form of spending on credit, and collecting taxes later. That is what is being done here.
Government-induced ‘stimulus’ was counterproductive in Japan in the 1990’s; it was massively counterproductive in America in the 1930’s; I can think of no example where it ever achieved its alleged purpose, ever. Insanity is sometimes defined as attempting the same experiment with the same inputs under the same conditions and expecting a different result. I wonder what it should be called when you attempt the experiment without even reading the document that defines what you are legally obligated to do.
If princes could create wealth by mere decree, every prince since Nimrod of Shinar or Oannes of Eridu before the Deluge would have done so.
This just in: one day after the most massive spending spree in world history is signed into law, politicos are already planning “to nationalize” (for those of you who don’t speak Pol, in our language, English, the word means “to plunder”) the banks, in an effort to halt the mortgage crisis. Since the mortgage crises was caused, by and large, by the state-sponsored banks known as Freddie and Fanny, it is unclear why the banking industry should be turned over to the very institution, in many cases the very people, who so mismanaged the banking industry as to produce the crisis in the first place.
If the so-called stimulus package did not address the current financial downturn, can we finally all agree to stop pretending it had any other purpose aside from funding a longstanding socialist wishlist of pork barrel projects, and a massive power grab into the medical profession?
Those of you who still look with hope toward the Republican Party, bid those hopes adieu: the people supporting the bank looting plan include Alan Greenspan and Lindsey Graham.
In a related story, the captains of the automotive industry, dressed like the ragged orphans from the musical OLIVER, have come with their begging bowls to Washington today, moaning and mewling, “Please, sir. I want more!”
I would like to hear from some of my left-leaning friends (if I have any left) in what respect these current plans differ from the fascism of Mussolini? How does it differ from the ‘corporatist state’ plans of 1930’s Italy? On what possible ground can it be argued that taking tax money from the workingman (or inflating the currency / increasing the national debt, which has the same effect on the workingman in the long run) and giving it by the steam-shovel-full to the cigar-smoking jet-setting silk-top-hat tycoons of the banking industry and the automotive industry helps the people? Why aren’t you more outraged at this marriage of the capitalist class to imperial state power than I am?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
