Sunday, May 27, 2012

The Anointed

Whenever an individual or group of individuals set about to direct economic affairs, disaster is the result.  This has been everywhere and always true; along with death (we omit “taxes” as the Greeks have demonstrated this exercise is voluntary) it is a guaranteed outcome. 

Just a bit of knowledge of history, a tiny serving of economics is all that is needed to understand this reality.  But lessons are never learned. Round and round we go.

We have witnessed this result in the US as an interventionist administration, gifted with great insight passed down directly from the gods has thwarted what otherwise would have been considerable economic progress. 

And now we have witnessed the same result but many times expanded as European elitists, the anointed, “their minds dulled by generations of inherited wealth,” as Liam Halligan of the Telegraph put it, set about to create their own commune (just as so many of the similarly afflicted did in Taos New Mexico in the 60’s; trust babies, nursing on the milk of Marx). Or that was the plan - one big happy E-Z family. Their motto, as borrowed from N.L. – “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.” 

Scornful of those of us who warned it could not work, we were dismissed as cranks at worst, as the simple working folk at best.

The books of Hayek and Freidman were thrown to the bonfire, those of Engels, Schumpeter and Veblen enshrined.  Lessons unlearned.

And now? And now most expect we are to live with this mess for years. Not likely. As we highlighted many weeks back, it is either fiscal union or the end. And it will come faster than most expect.


Robert Craven

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