Monday, September 29, 2008

Our Hobgoblin - The Government

With all the bad news about our finances in the news and our politicians apparently making it worse it's nice to take a breath and read an article by Walter Williams (Capitalism Magazine) basically telling us to take a deep breath and not to panic. We are a wealthy nation with a very productive people. If the politicians would just shut up and stay out of the way we will make it through this "crisis" (of their own making in my opinion).
"There is a H.L. Mencken quotation that captures the essence of this year's politics: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." The media, economic "experts" and both presidential candidates are making bad-talking our economy key features of their campaign messages. For politicians and their hangers-on, keeping the populace alarmed is a strategy to seize more control over our lives. It's so important that Senator John McCain took his economic adviser, former Senator Phil Gramm, to the woodshed for saying that America had "become a nation of whiners" and described the current slowdown as a "mental recession." Had Senator Gramm added that economically today's Americans are better off than at any time in our history, he might have lost his job altogether. Let's look at it."... (READ THE REST HERE)

No comments: