Our Country Crumbles

A so-called "stimulus" plan will pass that even Joe Biden acknowledges may not work but the Vice President somewhat generously places the scheme's odds for success at seventy/thirty. Obviously, Joe couldn't make it setting the line. It looks like we have a second-in-command who is not quite as bright as the neighborhood bookie. This bill is actually an impediment to recovery and an invitation to unprecedented inflation. We perhaps should not be heartened by the fact that the ancient Paul Volcker is one of Obama's close economic advisers because although the former Fed head clearly recognizes the dangers of inflation, his cures of twenty percent interest rates under Carter were about as bad as the disease. The recession would ultimately have been ended as a function of the markets had they been given a chance to work, but the intervention that is taking place poses a great hazard, prolongs the misery, creates more institutional obstacles to normal market function, and ultimately pushes the nation away from free market capitalism and into the camp of command economy socialism which has never worked anywhere on earth that it has been implemented. Capitalism rewards risk, work, and initiative, socialism punishes these attributes. I will lay odds with old Joe and parlous Paul (Volcker) that the plan emerging from Congress to save the economy has zero percent chance of success unless that is defined as forever altering the nation as we know it.