Sep 24 2008
Meet The New Deal, The Same As The Old Deal
While no one would ever confuse the presidential terms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt with those of George W. Bush, the overwhelming amount of government intervention in what should be a purely capitalist market had me thinking about the last time the government was this intrusive: the 1930’s. A world war costing the country all of its savings, a stock market so volatile that it could crash any day, and unemployment numbers that forced families to the streets are just some of the staggering similarities.
Over the past few months, the Federal government has continued to regulate the “free market” because they say that they are protecting us. However, the band-aid on this bullet wound is actually making the wound worse. If the Federal government is bailing out privately owned companies, who is going to bail out the Federal government? The last time I checked, our national pocketbook wasn’t in the best shape to be lending money to a bunch of organizations that just defaulted on the loans they took out in the first place. I guess it’s better than our usual technique of lending all of our money to other countries that have no intention of ever paying us back, but not by much.
The problem is that the economy is in the toilet, unemployment is through the roof, and more people are losing their homes by the hour. Instead of focusing on the causes of the problem (namely a government that frivolously misspent over three trillion dollars over the past eight years), the geniuses in Washington have decided to employ a temporary ”solution” that actually exacerbates the problems we are trying to solve. Giving lenders more money now would be rewarding the bad loans they approved over the past three years and encouraging them to continue the grossly negligent business practices that they have been employing.
If the Federal government really wants to overstep its bounds, it should spend money on creating more jobs and building more homes instead of saving corporations. The stock market and the publicly traded companies that compose it will be fine. The market will work itself out and some companies will fail while others will remain strong. Who is going to care for the worker? Who is going create jobs? Who is going to save your home for foreclosure? The fact is that the Federal government is not coming to our rescue. We must be willing to fight for ourselves because it is clear that no one else will. In 1928, President Herbert Hoover promised a chicken in every pot. Today, most people can’t even afford the pot.
