Loose Lips Sink Ships

What is our lifeblood?

Barack Obama said last Tuesday that our country’s lifeblood is credit and I have heard other politicians make similar statements. At first it sounded like a sensible statement, but the more I thought about it the more it sounded faulty. To put it another way, that statement means our country’s lifeblood is our ability to get ourselves into debt.

Making it easier to get ourselves into debt is the exact ability that got us into our current economic crisis. I understand that credit is a very important thing to keeping commerce moving forward. There are certainly businesses and individuals who are attempting to get loans to expand their businesses or purchase homes. However, if credit didn’t exist at all, goods and services would still be purchased - it would just take longer to save up the money to do so.

I would instead argue that productivity is our country’s lifeblood. Productivity is the measuring stick that lenders use to determine whether someone is worthy of taking on debt. If someone is not going to be productive especially with someone else’s money, they shouldn’t be given a loan or extended credit.

After thinking about this topic, it seemed like such a simple concept. This doesn’t appear to be an extraordinary revelation to me, but why are our political leaders still pursuing solutions that will make it easier to get ourselves in to debt? It seems that pursuing solutions that make us more productive would be more sensible.

Thoughts?

Full Disclosure

There appears to be a backlash against capitalism going on in America at the moment due to our current economic troubles.  I’m of the opinion that we haven’t been watching capitalism in action over the last several years, but a bastardization of it - although that’s a different conversation all together.  We have watched the economy tank, in part, due to unscrupulous people proclaiming to make money only to be found as frauds when their house of cards collapsed.  Bernie Madoff is a good example.  These people built up their personal wealth at the expense of others.  They did so in an effort to either accumulate money or power or prestige or any other number of selfish motives, but they did so in ways that disguised their deceit.  All of this was deplorable and I’m happy to see them pay for their actions while I genuinely feel for those who were duped.

The more I think about the “stimulus” package that our congressional leaders are promoting and the eager lobbyists are foaming at the mouths over, the more similarity I see between the deceit on Wall Street.  The biggest difference is that our congressmen aren’t hiding the methods for which they are amassing their wealth - they’re just printing more money and giving it to the people who vote for them.  In a sense, they are putting even less effort into accumulating their wealth, power and prestige than the Bernie Madoff’s of the world and they are doing it right in front of our eyes.

Does this concern anyone?  Does anyone feel that we’re just lining up for an even bigger economic collapse than what we’re experiencing right now?  If we’re putting our faith in the government to save us with this “stimulus” idea, who will bail out the government when this idea fails?

The next road to happiness.

Why does the “economic stimulus” discussion taking place right now sound like the same old story in another package? For thirty years, politicians told us that everyone deserved a house and did everything they could to make that happen. They pressured companies to make bad loans and, along with Wall Street, found ways to make those loans easier to swallow.

So they encouraged us to spend our way in to massive amounts of debt because we were envious of what everyone else had and we were told we deserved it. We weren’t just entitled to the right to pursue happiness; we had the right to happiness itself. Now that the party is over, we’re being told that it isn’t fair that we’re suffering and the government will fix what ails us. We still deserve happiness and since the last plan didn’t work (spending like we individuals had the money) the government is going to spend money it doesn’t have to give everyone that happiness.

Why do people in the government think they can legislate happiness? Why do they think they know what makes each individual happy? We’ll end up legislating ourselves into an existence where we live at the lowest common denominator in society and looking to the government to provide us everything. I’m not actually this pessimistic, but it’s difficult to not hypothesize around these possibilities.

My goal for myself is to work to control what I can control, and not let my circumstances dictate my happiness. I can be joyful regardless of the situation I’m in and I’m determined to do just that.