Scott Lazarowitz
lewrockwell.com
September 27, 2013
Our fanatically Keynesian President Barack Obama believes that governments should spend money they don’t have and put the country into debt. So he is whining to Republicans to continue raising the debt ceiling so the federal government can continue on its wild spending spree.
And Obama has the nerve to say that the opposing Party’s not wanting to do the President’s bidding by irresponsibly raising the debt ceiling is “extorting” the President. He claims that it is extortion when some of the people’s representatives tell the Dear Leader to stop stealing from our grandchildren!
This Obama person is just as bad as the Bush that preceded him. And the power-grabbers of the Federal Reserve and the banksters are just as dishonest and irresponsible.
But they are merely reflecting the general population now, the selfish, impatient and id-oriented population of America.
And some people are speculating that Janet Yellen, Vice Chairman of the Fed’s Board of Governors, will be picked to be the next Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, replacing Ben Bernanke.
Like Bernanke, Ms. Yellen apparently believes in using the apparatus of government intervention to control economic matters. And she certainly favors Keynesian policies, “easy money” and continuing with the self-indulgent spending habits.
The Economic Collapse Blog’s Michael Snyder notes how Ms. Yellen was totally clueless in 2007, really believing that those artificial housing and other stimulus would be “still likely to achieve a relatively smooth adjustment path.” And then in 2010 she testified that she did not see the meltdown and collapse coming, as the current Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, also did not see it coming.
However, those of the Austrian school way of thinking, such as Ron Paul, did see it coming, as I have noted before.
And in response to The Bernank’s recent “no taper” announcement, Ron Paul asked (Preview) , morally what right does Bernanke have “to take away 2% of our purchasing power deliberately? What right does he have to punish the elderly who save money?”
Dr. Paul warned against further destruction of the dollar and malinvestment caused by artificial interest rates.
Actually, as long as any kind of economic activity is artificial, or artificially “stimulated” by monopolistic and unaccountable governmental intrusions, there’s a good chance that that will cause malinvestment.
And the other part of that is the intrusions are coming from some central planner, such as the Fed and its high-and-mighty Chairman or from an act of Congress, for that matter. What you will then have is “planned chaos,” as Ludwig von Mises pointed out.
In contrast, with freedom and free markets consumers and producers are left free to plan their own economic matters. In a system of more freedom and randomness, you have less chaos because such a system is freed from the destructive intrusions of those bureaucratic buffoons and parasites and their “fatal conceit” that guides them.
But sadly, the majority of people in America do not appreciate that freedom, independence and responsibility, in our modern age of decadence and covetousness.
America has become a society in which irresponsibility and immediate gratification are institutionalized, praised and rewarded. And that is exactly what the Keynesian economics of Janet Yellen, Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman and millions of others promotes.
The truth is, those folks of the Keynesian way of thinking don’t even practice economics — their love is for politics and in strengthening the political class.
You see, at some point private economic matters in America became politicized. And it was the politicians who exploited crises, panics and economic downturns and they then sold a bunch of snake oil to the desperate masses as a means of the politicians grabbing more and more political and police power over the people.
And, coinciding with the decline of critical thinking in America, the politicians’ minions in academia and the Press supported the ideas of deficit spending and promoting debts as a way to get out of recessions and depressions.
Reflecting the mental laziness reinforced by government schooling, it makes the unthinking academics and pundits feel good when they are relieved of having to make any effort in solving the problems that caused those recessions and depressions in the first place, and instead they can just get their monetary meds right away. (Hmmm. Can we get Big Pharma in on this?)
But these kinds of irresponsible, immediate gratification habits are like drug addictions, and like drug addicts the spending addicts put their entire family into the poor house. And this is what the power-grabbing politicians want, encouraging the people to then beg them for more “easy money” and other wealth-redistribution schemes to bail them out.
As long as they are further enriched and empowered over others, the politicians and bureaucrats get what they crave with each new power-grabbing vote in Congress, just as the Fed’s manipulations empower the banksters to get new money to fund their bonuses while the politicians’ Fed-stimulated inflation steals even more from the people.
However, America’s immediate gratification society can be seen in other areas now. For example, the cops and prosecutors, and “national security” bureaucrats who get away with warrantless searches and stopping and frisking innocent people. Why wait for a judge to sign a warrant? That takes too long. They crave to do their searches immediately. And even when there’s no suspicion of specific individuals they want to search anyway. And why go through the trouble of coming across some actual individual who is suspicious to then do searches of his emails or phone records? Instead let’s search through and collect and keep a database of all Americans’ emails and phone records, and that way we can then find our needle in the haystack.
So that is a current example of the kind of immediate gratification mindset that Americans have developed in many areas of life — not just economic — over the past century, especially since the implementation of the income tax and the Federal Reserve System.
But such behaviors are those of irresponsibility, and only promote the satisfying of one’s immediate desires with total disregard for ethics and for the future (or for the rights of innocent people in the case of the “security” fanatics).
People want “easy money,” and they want it now. (Especially the banksters.) Don’t wait until you have enough money saved or have enough of an income to afford to buy a house — get a loan NOW and get a mortgage now anyway, and get that house. And spend as much as you can on your credit card, and put yourself in debt. Who cares about your family’s future, as long as you get that stuff you want now.
And the banksters want easy money and bailouts, because they know that regardless how irresponsible their lending practices and their investments are (with their customers‘ money, just as Congress is with taxpayers’ money), they are guaranteed by the government to be free from bankruptcy. And they will keep their jobs (while you lose yours).
You see, such a Keynesian mindset is especially thriving in those who want to have some central authority, the Fed or Congress, to act as “stimulator” of the population’s prosperity, and to dish out food stamps and other goodies, as well as artificially-stimulated interest rates and “easy money” (for the banksters).
Sadly, the masses are being fed the false belief that they are benefiting from these government bureaucrats and those monetary central planners like Helicopters Ben and Janet who hand out the easy money like candy.
But, as Lew Rockwell recently noted, it is the State and its agents who are enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else, while the advocates of freedom and independence, such as Ron Paul, are the ones who want the people liberated from the State’s tentacles and from its exploitation of the people’s labor and livelihoods.
It would be easier to get more people to see that, if only they could overcome their long-ingrained habits of short-sightedness, and their blind faith in the State as a savior.
This article was posted: Friday, September 27, 2013 at 10:08 am
Tags: big brother, domestic news, economics
Keynesianism: Policies of Selfishness, Irresponsibility and Immediate Gratification
