Why complain about the financial crisis? By liberalism’s standards, it has been a swift sword of economic justice, working to equalize wealth more rapidly than any policy short of summary execution of the rich…America experienced a financial decapitation in 2008. We saw $11 trillion in wealth disappear, an astonishing 18 percent. The destroyed wealth equals the combined annual output of Germany, Japan, and the U.K., according to the Wall Street Journal. And there’s nothing to soak the rich quite like a financial meltdown….A Blow for Income Equality, Rich Lowry, May 1, 2009
It’s funny how markets follow after nature. In a swamp, when the trees get too big and too voracious, they run out of nutrients and die, thus re-starting the swamp’s life cycle with rich rot. When fabulous wealth is concentrated in too few hands, the old saw about “you can’t ski behind more than one yacht” is never truer. The money unused, in short order, becomes a speculator’s fiction; the market steals its value back. Taking back almost a fifth of American wealth, the market has turned in other directions, away from the fantasy of money increasing in and of itself toward money helping to build productive enterprises, a drastic conversion from pipe dreams to meat and potatos. Today, of course, with meat and potatos well in hand, the meat and potatos investment might be lithium titanate rechargeables, or cloud computing terminals and networks, or electronic distribution of schoolbooks. It doesn’t matter what the basics are measured with; what does is that the market decided, with a very loud bang, that money for its own sake was a bad play. Government can only play distant, clumsy catchup to decisions this important.
Luther
No comments:
Post a Comment