Mea taxima culpa

As a middle-class American, I know it is my fault. What is? (Ask rather, What is not?) In this case, "it" refers to sluggish sales at this most sacred retail time of year, the Holidays.

I should be out there buying, purchasing, acquiring, getting; I should be stretching every last atom of what credit remains to me helping to prop up the giant edifice and grease the vast machinery of American Consumption, without which, apparently, the economy of the entire world is grinding to an ungainly halt.

Yet I confess to confusion: I am told I neither save enough nor spend enough. With impatience I await the far more specific orders that are bound to emanate profusely from the Obama White House. Perhaps these orders will be simplified by Obama's new tax policy. If I have no money left after taxes to misuse, surely I can't make any more bad decisions, and the great ship of State will right itself and sail forward once again ...

Voltaire's Candide

. . . offers us, 260 years on, a way to look at the world and a way to act in it that can scarcely be improved upon.

Everything is for the best

in this best of all possible worlds.

And,

We must cultivate our own gardens.

Mystery post

Marian K. Coombs Marian Coombs Marian Kester Coombs Marian K. Coombs Marian Coombs Marian Kester Coombs Marian K. Coombs Marian Coombs Marian K. Coombs Marian Coombs Marian Kester Coombs Marian K. Coombs Marian Coombs Marian K. Coombs Marian Coombs Marian Kester Coombs Marian K. Coombs Marian Coombs Marian K. Coombs Marian Coombs Marian Kester Coombs Marian K. Coombs Marian Coombs Marian K. Coombs Marian Coombs Marian Kester Coombs Marian K. Coombs Marian Coombs Marian K. Coombs Marian Coombs Marian Kester Coombs Marian K. Coombs Marian Coombs Marian K. Coombs Marian Coombs Marian Kester Coombs Marian K. Coombs Marian Coombs Marian K. Coombs Marian Coombs

Marian Kester Coombs Marian Kester Coombs Marian Kester Coombs Marian Kester Coombs 

A blessing in disguise?

It sure does look as though the mighty powers aligned behind the B.H. Obama candidacy will get their way next Tuesday, although - oddly - a majority of voters seems to be shuddering at the prospect. According to a recent poll (http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/election_20082/2008_presidential_election/63_say_obama_more_likely_to_restrict_gun_rights),
most Americans think Obama will increasingly ban guns - and we also know that most Americans don't care for that sort of thing.

But imagine what the election of John McCain would mean.

• Four more dismal years of Bush-Republican rule. Despite McCain's protestations to the contrary, he is more like Bush than any other of the Republican candidates he defeated. His election would mean no well-deserved repudiation of the Bush experiment in preemptive war, currency debasement and throwing ersatz money around like a drunken apparatchik - all the while calling it "conservatism" and wrecking the rep of the GOP.

• Continued malaise on the right. Sure, the GOP would be "in power," but with what mandate, and with what energy? Let the Democrats take over the mess; conservatives need to regroup, buck up, and take a long hard look at how the past eight years could have happened, so that it may never happen again.

• Misuse of Sarah Palin. Peggy Noonan may not fancy Sarah, but most conservatives do - a lot. Is suddenly being made vice-president the best use of this tremendous natural resource? Palin should be allowed to develop, gain experience, and truly blossom as a leader. She has the potential to be our Maggie Thatcher - but not just yet.

• 1992 all over again. An Obama presidency would rejuvenate, resurrect, resuscitate, reenergize, reanimate and re-you name it the conservative movement. Especially if the Dems contrive a trifecta, the makings of the 1994 Republican Revolution will once more be in play. And this time we will not be saddled with Newt Gingrich: May we learn from his disgraced example, both political and personal.
  

• And last/not least: We would be deprived of the spectacle of Barack Hussein Obama playing the role of President of the United States.
  

Where does government end and the market begin?

The most careful writers are seeming to have trouble making a rigorous distinction between governmental economic actions and private economic actions. Where do the activities of the state -- regulation, taxation, oversight, arbitration, civil and criminal prosecution -- stop, and the independent, profit-seeking, "capitalist" private sector's domain begin? In terms of the present financial crisis, which came first, the corporate fat cat or the corrupt pol? Or are they even two distinct classes of person?

Pat Buchanan (The American Conservative, October 6, 2008) also finds a blur where this divide should be:

"'Government must save us!' cries the Left, as ever. Yet who got us into this mess if not the government -- the Fed with its easy money, Bush with his profligate spending, and Congress and the SEC by liberating Wall Street and failing to step in and stop the drunken orgy? [emphasis added] ...

"An unelected financial elite is now entrusted with the assignment of getting us out of a disaster into which an unelected financial elite plunged the nation. [emphasis added] We are just spectators."

Whose responsibility is it to rein in Wall Street? If it is the state's, as Pat implies in the first paragraph, then our system is not free-market capitalism; thus we should hand even more authority over to the state to regulate economic decision-making. If it is Wall Street's responsibility, as he implies in the second paragraph, then why blame Congress for not doing Wall Street's job? These "elites" are a confusing concept, and therefore not a concept at all.

Pat's final paragraph, however, is clear as a bell and impossible to deny:

"What the Greatest Generation handed down to us -- the richest, most powerful, most self-sufficient republic in history, with the highest standard of living any nation had ever achieved -- the baby boomers, oblivious and self-indulgent to the end, have frittered away."

Keep talking happy talk

Even before the current Financial Meltdown, there was scare talk out there in abundance. But here are some quotes from an article by Brian Kaller ("Future Perfect" in the mid-August issue of The American Conservative) that are heartening in any "crisis" environment:

"[Doomsayers]' long-held note of dread is useful only to the extent that it inspires people to do something more practical. The world we create will be, up to a point, whatever we were preparing for ...

"A critical mass of Americans who believe in an imminent zombie apocalypse runs the risk of making the future more difficult than it need be. Just as a Depression-era panic could crash a bank that would not otherwise have failed, so a widespread belief in a violent and hopeless end could actually make Americans less likely to work together during the next outage or shortage.

"... Say that Americans make only a third as much money, cut driving by two-thirds. Assume that extended families have to move in together to conserve resources and that we must cut our flying by 98 percent.

"Many would consider that a fairly clear picture of collapse. But we have been there before, and recently. Those are the statistics of the 1950s -- not remembered as a big time for cannibalism.

"Happiness, as defined by survey responses, peaked [in the mid-20th century] ... and has plummeted even as our incomes tripled.

"The tight bonds and sanguine outlook of young people in the '50s ... originated in their shared experience on the home front during World War II. Working together during a national crisis made them lifelong model citizens, who swelled rates of optimism and civic activism at every age as they passed, like a pig through a python, across a demographic lifetime. ...

"... Handled right, peak oil [which is the crisis addressed by this particular article way back in August] could bring a revival of small-town America, local farming, small businesses, and an economy that centers around Main Street rather than Wall Street."

Brian Kaller is apparently an Irish journalist who lives in County Kildare; more of his writing is at http://www.restoringmayberry.blogspot.com . I enjoy zombie apocalypse at least as much as the next person, but as a real outcome? Not so much!

Note to self

Never a dull moment.  Having missed the fact that my website had fallen into the public domain, I awoke this week to find an interloper camped upon it, writing as -- Marian Coombs.  So far the content is surprisingly innocuous, but the incident has prompted me to start this site instead.