Political Hypertrophy Produces Economic Anemia

The stimulus efforts, TARP, etc, do not and will never produce the expected recovery, which is being assumed as a functional result of such continuingly massive interventionism in the national economy by the State.   What the stimulus package really represents is a massively hyper-pork, legislative ensemble with ear marks galore and, moreover, designed primarily to grow the government sector, certainly not the private sector, tremendously beyond current limits.  It is an attempt, as could be demonstrated, to further ideologically glorify the American welfare-warfare State well into the entire 21st century.

The much overpromised revitalization of the economy will not be able, however, to genuinely come about by such clearly interventionist (read: economically regressive) efforts.   In any event, the American public need not ever fear for the future, as long as such notable exemplars of amazing virtue, e.g., as with Timmy Tax Cheat at the US Treasury who leads the questionable way; the exact level of modern ethics of the current Administration, in Washington, DC, has, moreover, been fully revealed for all the American people to easily see.  

Seemingly gone are those rejected, supposed dark ages when Lord Action, quite rightly, had said: “Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.”

Endless Interventionism: The Road to Serfdom

This Administration specializes, however, in doing what it likes, as is noted above, because it will not do what it ought to do to truly revitalize and substantially renew this nation’s economy.   The prolongation of this government-provoked recession is going to be because of the ideological desire, by the Chief Executive (an ideological cult figure), to make the terrible leap from the troublesome mixed economy of today to that of a social-market/socialist economy in the near future.  

It will be the proverbial jump from the frying pan of a recession into the fire of a depression, meaning another New Deal for America, much worse than was the last attempt at such collectivism, on a grand scale.  People, millions more, year by year will, through increased dependency, be sucked into the maelstrom of the policies and programs of Big Government, which is the real purpose of the so-called stimulus bill, not a supposed recovery.  

The general availability of most credit in the private sector will, thus, be basically hurt; millions of jobs will, consequently, not be created since capital will then not be obtained for aiding such economic activity; insanely, the failure of what will occur will then just encourage the false thought that more economic stimulus, as with a drunk getting more liquor to drink, can succeed where the past effort (obviously) could not.  

There will, essentially speaking, be no great immediate relief for the economy.  Trillions of dollars will, therefore, be wasted deliberately in the utopian effort, as ideological fiction, to create the Fabian Socialist ideal of a social-market economy, while there will surely be, in reality, the destruction of the nation’s financial system.   Eventually, wholesale nationalizations are predicted to be done starting with most or all of the major banks, before many other sectors of the economy get later nationalized.

America will then become further impoverished, the standard of living for the majority of citizens will be substantially lowered, the current generation of young adults will be mainly lost due to the resulting depression, and politico-structural impediments to a good recovery are to be, thus, variously created.  Orwellian language, as with the use of the term “investment,” conveniently hides the actual reality that often wasteful or simply useless spending must occur.

As would be easily noted by ASE economists, the Federal government has empowered itself further by developing the ways and means for ensuring the need for the more rapid expansion of the many current and ever new instrumentalities of the State; this has been made, therefore, further possible by voting into existence, in effect, a European-style socialist State, as is now, so very obviously, wanted by the Democratic Party, as is, thus, empirically seen through its clear majority in the US Congress.   

The stimulus bill (initially $819 billion and actually to be about $1.2 trillion finally) vote of January 28, 2009, in the Congress’ House of Representatives, with 244 Democrats strongly voting in favor and all the Republicans definitely voting no, needs to be forever seen as being truly historic.  

Conclusion: America at a Crossroads

This radical ideological effort at creating political hypertrophy, therefore, necessarily produces economic anemia because a politically-determined, centrally planned economy has never, in fact, historically succeeded in surpassing the magnitude of achievements and accomplishments of a free-enterprise-oriented economy.   And, that is a fact that can be well documented.   For a truly wide variety of suggested reading on the actual superiority free-market economics, one can, e.g., profitably go to see: http://www.acton.org/research/reading/research_reading_freemarket.php