$100 a Bungle for Oil

Stirling is on target, again. Go read.

$100 a Bungle for Oil | The Agonist

In a liberal Keynesian order – you know, the people who won the second world war, and the cold war, quadrupled real standards of living and cut poverty by a factor of four – the pattern is that the central bank is used to slow economic activity, and then the fiscal authority – presuming it is populated by people who might be egregiously corrupt, venal and racist, but who are not rapaciously committed to selling the future in to debt slavery – will vote for a series of stimulus initiatives that will both get the economy moving, and lay the ground work for the future economic expansion by investing in capital which, while too expensive and risking for the private market place, is not too expensive for a government that has just proven its credibility by taking political pain rather than selling posterity out for their posteriors in office. Since this is exactly what our current political leadership – on both sides of the aisle – has declined to do, the people buying futures on America’s liberties know that they can keep doing it.

Instead in the neo-conservative order, the central bank keeps the expansion going as long as the rich are getting richer, stops it when the poor start to get richer, and then once the fiscal house in more in order, the fiscal authority, that’s the Congress plus the President in the US, bails out any rich people who were accidentally hurt by the recession. The Saving’s and Loan Bail out, the Bush and Reagan tax cuts are examples of thise exact process. Did you know you are still paying interest on the money used to bail out Neil Bush? Think on that. Your grand children will also being paying interest on that, and interest on the money used to bail out Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. And probably a couple of other bailouts after that. If you aren’t angry, you aren’t paying attention, or you are getting checks from the man. Cash’em quick though, you thought you were getting dollars and really you are getting BushBucks.

Bernanke, by doing as he has done – anything is better than allowing an economic slide that would bring a liberal to power, it is in his academic work – assures not that we will avoid an economic collapse, but that it will come later and be larger, and have more consequences. While the arab world is far far behind the US now, a generation of sending them all our money can equalize things. There is no reason in genetics, society or science that the Arab world cannot become technically and economically capable of destroying the West, given enough money and time.