The Upside of Our Coming Economic Depression

by Thomas R. Eddlem
by Tom R. Eddlem

If you love liberty, I want to inform you that the coming economic depression won’t be all bad news.

So what if the stock market is almost half its former value? So what if home foreclosure rates are in the stratosphere and unemployment rates are rising? So what if the deficit is over a trillion dollars this year and will increase more for the foreseeable future?

I’m more of a "glass is half-full" guy, even when someone else has already swilled the beer in the glass down to the foam.

My good friend Will Grigg likes to tell me that one of the marks of a depression is that "nobody has any money, but everything’s cheap." Well, that means everything’s going to be as cheap as gas these days!

So what if you can’t buy things, they’ll be cheap!

The dollar may become increasingly worthless abroad, but it’ll still remain precious here in the good ‘ol U.S. of A.

Perhaps you Austrian economists out there are now incredulously replying "Precious? It’s worthless and backed with nothing more than the paper it’s printed on!"

Not true, my friend.

The dollar is backed by a highly valuable specie that every American (except Irwin Schiff) needs: units for payment of income taxes to the federal government.

Let’s face it, if the federal government didn’t require us to return these dollar/tax units to them every April 15^th, there quickly wouldn’t be any advantage in having dollars. That’s the only reason you would even bother to own a dollar: the intrinsic value in the dollar’s ability to keep you out of federal prison after April 15^th every year.

If they abolished income and FICA taxes, we’d instead quickly switch to trading in more valuable commodities such as Euros, Google shares, Paypal credits, or green stamps. (Yes, I know green stamps don’t exist any more. But they’d still be more valuable than the dollar.) And the dollar would become truly worthless.

But the Obama administration is not likely to devalue the dollar by reducing the number of tax units we must return to Washington any time soon. So the dollar will remain precious to Americans.

Cheap prices and a strong dollar are not the only benefits to our coming depression, however. The coming contraction of the world credit markets will mean Washington will have to cut spending and bring the federal budget back down to earth and near balance.

They’ll have to cut spending. Imagine the following:

• Several trillion dollars in new spending in Obama’s campaign promises … gone.
• Socialized medicine … D.O.A.
• Our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan … crippled, or gone.
• Funding for der Homeland Security State … scrutinized for the first time, and cut.

Nothing would warm the cockles of my heart more than to give pink slips to the eavesdropping spooks at the NSA and the torturing spooks at the CIA.

…Well, nothing except one thing: If we handed them indictments along with the pink slips.

"Excuse me," you counter, "but won’t they just print more debt and keep spending more?"

"Yes, they will print more debt," I reply.

But it won’t do them any good.

Another very big upside to the coming depression is that jingoists and America firsters (I count myself among latter group) won’t be able to cry and moan about how the Chinese are buying too much American debt any more. The Chinese are "losing their taste" for American debt these days.

The insidious "Chinese influence" in our national affairs, whatever it was, will soon be negligible. They aren’t going to buy much more of our ever-increasing amount of bad debt in the worsening global recession.

Commie-haters like me will have to go back to crackpot conspiracy theories about how the Chinese are massing an invasion force just over the Mexican border. It’s impossible to prove logically that they aren’t there, ya know. You can’t prove a negative.

Speaking of Mexico, the depression will cure the border "crisis." We’ve already seen a reduction of the number of people crossing the Rio Grande illegally since the recession started. It will soon decrease from a high of about 5,000 per day to an estimated 53 per day. Most of these remaining illegal border crossings will be day laborers hired by wealthy Mexican families as coyotes to bring back jobless family members stranded in America who can’t afford to leave on their own.

So those Mexicans won’t be taking "our" jobs any more. That means the polite, hard-working Hispanic people I can barely understand from whom I purchase my morning coffee will be replaced by lazy, insulting fellow Americans with tattoos and nose rings that I understand only too well.

So don’t be depressed just because the nation’s in a depression. There’s a whole host of good news out there for you: A strong dollar, cheap prices, a balanced budget, less government spending, fewer foreign wars, less Chinese communist influence, an end to the immigration crisis and the continued ability to see the doctor of your own choosing.

Of course, you probably won’t have a job or a home – or maybe even food money. But I just wanted you to know that there is an upside to our coming depression.

January 10, 2009

Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a freelance writer who has been published in more than 20 periodicals, and his essays have been re-published in six books. It sure sounds impressive to say "his essays have been republished in six books," but Mr. Eddlem hasn’t actually written a whole book. He’s far too lazy for that. Rather, he’s written forewords, single chapters and such, and then hoodwinked publishers into thinking his little ditties are good enough to put in books. But he has built up one heck of a killer byline.

Copyright © 2009 LewRockwell.com

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