who's to blame for the economy

I follow a fellow on facebook named Philp Snyder. When someone posted that the economic "hole" was due to a "wholesale assault" by President Bush, Snyder commented that this was more a result of an "assault on the foundations of our economy ... since LBJ, the government has been promising too much to too many people and not dealing with the inintended consequences of its social engineering decisions." Brilliant! I wholeheartedly agree. But of course the liberal mind couldn't stop itself from blaming the conservative so the response was to disagree and point out that in 2000 the budget surplus was $230b.

To that, Snyder gave this wonderful response:

... individual surplusses do not mean that we haven't been assulting the foundations of our economy. When we started rewarding bad behavior with money, we started getting more bad behavior. When we started encouraging women to have children outside of marriage, we started to get a generation raised without fathers and we saw and explosion, a few years later, of crime. The foundations of our economy are not fiscal nor are they monetary. They are MORAL foundations! The old unspoken contract of a man's word being his bond has died and the new "controlling legal authority" is if it is legal, then it must be ethical and moral.

We live in a society where what is considered inconvient is considered disposable. The unwritten rules of behavior have been done away with. The idea that a man's word is his bond no longer holds water. The idea that corporate directors had anything to be responsible for except the next quarter's results or that business had a responsiblity to act ethically no longer exist.

These things all take their toll on our economy in that they increase the transaction costs of doing business. No one takes responsibility for himself anymore - let alone for anyone else. Everything is "it's not my fault" or "it's not fair."

Our politicians no longer are interested in solutions, only in power. That has been true since at least the Johnson administration but it has become more and more true since the time of Reagan.

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