A Self-Crashing Train

I was watching John Stossel just now, and a thought occurred to me: all these bail-outs and stimulus checks and everything else we keep hearing are going to save the American economy are doing just the opposite of what was intended. Rather than shoring up confidence, I believe they are convincing the American people that bail-outs and stimulus checks are what we need if our economy is going to survive. That is not a confidence-builder. In fact, that's a pretty bleak proposition.

Just think about it for a second. What message does it send when our leaders keep trying to tell us that they are the only ones that can keep up from going bankrupt, when it was our leaders who brought us to where we are in the first place. Even if one were to argue that the government didn't directly contribute to our financial crisis (and that one person would have to be pretty dang brazen to try and make that argument, given the evidence), it's unavoidably true that they didn't solve it before it happened. The fact that the financial crisis is occurring even now must lead someone to one of two conclusions about the government. Either they can control the economy to a large extent and they chose to have it tank, or they can't control the economy and nothing they can do will help. I'm not sure which side I fall down on. Either one makes a whole lot of sense.

Am I doing rocket science? Am I a genius? Am I overlooking some vital piece of information that ought to lead to me the conclusion that government both can control the economy well enough to make it do well and yet not well enough to prevent it from doing poorly? If so, I need to know it, and I think everyone else needs to know it.

I fear I have exactly the right idea about what's going on here. It's so staggeringly simple and so staggeringly self-evident that I'm surprised anyone believes anything else. Please, show me the light. Otherwise, I fear we're in for a very dark and gloomy next two years at least.

B-Ran wrote:I was watching John Stossel just now, and a thought occurred to me: all these bail-outs and stimulus checks and everything else we keep hearing are going to save the American economy are doing just the opposite of what was intended. Rather than shoring up confidence, I believe they are convincing the American people that bail-outs and stimulus checks are what we need if our economy is going to survive. That is not a confidence-builder. In fact, that's a pretty bleak proposition.

Just think about it for a second. What message does it send when our leaders keep trying to tell us that they are the only ones that can keep up from going bankrupt, when it was our leaders who brought us to where we are in the first place. Even if one were to argue that the government didn't directly contribute to our financial crisis (and that one person would have to be pretty dang brazen to try and make that argument, given the evidence), it's unavoidably true that they didn't solve it before it happened. The fact that the financial crisis is occurring even now must lead someone to one of two conclusions about the government. Either they can control the economy to a large extent and they chose to have it tank, or they can't control the economy and nothing they can do will help. I'm not sure which side I fall down on. Either one makes a whole lot of sense.

Am I doing rocket science? Am I a genius? Am I overlooking some vital piece of information that ought to lead to me the conclusion that government both can control the economy well enough to make it do well and yet not well enough to prevent it from doing poorly? If so, I need to know it, and I think everyone else needs to know it.

I fear I have exactly the right idea about what's going on here. It's so staggeringly simple and so staggeringly self-evident that I'm surprised anyone believes anything else. Please, show me the light. Otherwise, I fear we're in for a very dark and gloomy next two years at least.

Government intervention can only have a negative effect in the market. I think that "they" believe that they can help the economy, but of course they can't. They will continue to "F" it up worse and worse. Right now, we should be standing out on the street corners yelling "I TOLD YOU SO!!!" It may seem hard to believe now, but just a couple of months ago, the mainstream media was talking about how inevitable the bailouts were and how they would solve the problem. As more and more bailouts come along, we will finally realize that we created the monster of the problem that is soon becoming a depression. As far as I can tell, this will be worse than the Great Depression by most standards. We are seeing what happens when a country trusts its monetary policy to a central entity.

The government/Federal Reserve always talks about how consumer confidence is what we need. They are wrong. Consumers having too much confidence has been part of the problem so far. Consumer overconfidence has led us to spend money that we didn't have with the expectation that we will have a better economy to pay for it in the future. We need less consumer confidence, which we are now beginning to see, to get this economy back on track.