jwrabble

There has been no shortage of amusement the past two weeks as the world economy circles the toilet bowl on one hand, while on the other two national elections get sillier and sillier.

One has to laugh at the freemarketeers who came crawling to the government begging for public money to save their butts and preserve their multi- million dollar salaries. What part of a free market is a government bailout? I guess what is meant by free market is a license to plunder, and when the public can not be plundered enough privately, then plunder their public purse.

It is no surprise that things are crashing with fiat money based on little but faith. I had to laugh when the economic commentators on TV described the dive in the stock market as money that had vanished. Not money that went somewhere else, but money that ceased to exist. The act of buying and selling creates or destroys money without anything tangible attached to its value? No wonder we are in trouble.

Other reasons for the trouble, of course, are banks lending money to people with insufficient collateral, shall we call them faith based loans, and governments that spend billions on wars and other things without raising taxes to cover their expenses. That, I guess, makes organizations like the U.S. government one of those getting loans without sufficient collateral. As of last year the U.S. government current account was $731 billion in the red. Recently I think that it has descended past the $1 trillion point.

On the election front, childish nattering seems to have replaced substantive discussions of issues. Things have been done so badly, it seems, that the parties in power see no advantage in running on the quality of their performance.

In the U.S. the McCain campaign is trying to distract the voters with things like "Obama is a friend of terrorists" and what not, and inaccurate or incomplete portrayals of his record. No doubt we will see the Obama campaign fire back in kind. None of it is really germane to the pressing issues at hand. Who cares if Obama knows Bill Ayers, a 1960s era radical? And who cares if McCain is a friend of convicted felon and would be murderer G. Gordon Liddy, or that disgrace to his country and my Marine Corps, Oliver North, endorses him.

In Canada things aren’t much better, except for the current account, Canada being one of the countries in the world that is financially stable. But in politics particularly the Conservatives and the Liberals seem to be wasting a lot of time trying to impeach other candidates for this frivolity or that, rather than focus on what really matters to Canadians. Maybe they have no real solutions, or maybe just a big thing for puffin poop.

Today as I was cleaning up my vegetable garden, seeing how many more pickings I might get before the frost nails it, I got to wondering about those freemarketeers and politicians whose actions affect our lives. I grew up on a farm in a time when we still raised a lot of our own food, and even today, no longer on a farm, I try to raise as much as I can. Food, not money, not stocks, not a room full of electronic toys, is a mainstay of our existence. And, I wonder what those people really know about food, or nature, or the cycle of life. From their actions I think as a whole probably very little, else their values would certainly be different.

Their values seem to be dominated by greed for wealth and power and individual satisfaction. Values that unfortunately permeate much of society. Those are the values that lead to collapse. They are not the values of raising food and working collectively to ensure healthy societies that can survive.