Good News:
If We keep Borrowing, We Can Avoid The Fiscal Cliff
I have no idea if the game show hosts in government will come up with a plan to avoid the fiscal cliff. However, I do know that every minute they waste trying to figure out how to keep the supply of money flowing to special interest groups, is more time taken away from fixing the real problems. Between campaigning non-stop, and figuring out how to plunder the nation's grandchildren, there is barely time left over to check NFL highlights.
Captains of the Idiocracy
Clearly I have been teeing off a lot recently on Ayn Rand, because even though she is dead, she provided the philosophical inspiration for the NeoCon movement that created this fiasco. As always, abject greed requires some semblance of ideological pseudo-philosophy, and the myth of Atlas provided it. In reality, Ayn Randism, is really just recycled social Darwinism, nothing more, nothing less. Survival of the fittest. However, in her version it's not a natural imperative, it's a moral imperative. In other words she conveniently inverted morality from altruism to self interest, and the Lost Boys have been running with it ever since. That gets us back to the question, "who is John Galt?" i.e. who are the "great men" of this fucked up era that we should be looking up to? Jamie Dimon? George W. Bush? Ben Bernanke? Paul Krugman? RomneyBot? (I have Obama down as a game show host v.s. captain, but I am open to debate)...
For a society that supposedly lives by the principal of everyone for himself, apparently the Idiocracy has lost track of the more important aspects of survival. In other words the greed angle is amply covered, but the crucial survival instinct has been all but abandoned. We could debate all day if this is the greediest or dumbest society in history, however, I submit that there isn't much to argue that this society has somehow managed to attain a combined level of greed and stupidity unparalleled in history - quite an accomplishment. Clearly the most significant unintended consequence of this 30+ year credit-sponsored vacation from reality, is an overwhelming lack of resilience towards adversity. A lot of excesses that should have been jettisoned a long time ago, have become baselined into the average lifestyle.
So ironically, those NeoCons who supposedly adhere to Ayn Rand's social darwinism, apparently have not thought through its full implications. I would submit that the Romney Class at the top of this crumbling pyramid have unwittingly rendered themselves the least capable of surviving its collapse given their ongoing reliance on the pyramid model to propagate their standard of living. A highly ironic unintended consequence of success i.e. extinction.
On a related note, I have noticed that this blog gets a significant number of hits from Eastern Europe. I imagine that's because they are far more dialed in to the survival imperative, having survived a high level of economic adversity themselves. Relative to what they went through during the economic upheaval of the early 1990s, I would say our overall readiness to deal with that type of situation at the societal level, is about a one out of ten, plus or minus.
Fortunately we are assured by the Captains of the Idiocracy, that we are different. We are "exceptional".
Given our overwhelming preoccupation with bankrupting our grandchildren to temporarily extend the inherently unsustainable, I would have to concur.
