The Big Stimulus
Get rid of the empire
by
Justin Raimondo
by Justin Raimondo
 The
talk is all of stimuli and other matters economic – how do we re-inflate
the balloon of American prosperity? Reality has taken a hat-pin
to it, and trillions
have gone up in the smoke of foreclosed mortgages and credit-default
swaps.
Panaceas are
not lacking. Paul
Krugman says it doesn't matter what we spend our money on, as
long as we throw it away rapidly and without forethought. I have
no doubt that soon we'll be hearing the ghost of Huey Long promising
"Every
man a king!" I fully expect the Townsend Plan to come back
at some point, along, perhaps, with a revival of interest in pre-Leninist
forms of Marxism.
 Along
these lines, President Obama and his party have come up with a "stimulus
package," and I must pause to remark how important language
is to these people. It's a "package," you see, just
like a Christmas gift, only better, because they, the politicians,
get to play Santa Claus and shower their constituents with presents.
This legislative larceny is predicated on the oddly counterintuitive
notion that we can and should spend
our way out of poverty – that the sins of our profligacy can
be forgiven if only we indulge in yet more ravenous forms of gluttony.
To ordinary
Americans, this kind of Washington-think is wholly alien: it is
Bizarro
economics.
After all, when normal human beings are in financial trouble they
cut back on their spending, as they are doing
now. The American polity, in its younger days, would naturally
apply the same logic to government, but, in our dotage, we impart
magical powers to the organs of the state, which can produce wealth
out of thin air, with only the aid of a printing
press. Oh, yes, we understand – albeit vaguely – that this is
debt for future generations to pay. Yet we recall – even more vaguely
– old bromides like "We
owe it to ourselves," which are embedded in our collective
memory like flies in amber, and we are reassured.
Read
the rest of the article
January
31, 2009
Justin
Raimondo [send him mail]
is editorial director of Antiwar.com
and is the author of An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
Copyright
© 2009 Antiwar.com
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