“Conservatism
is a dead end proposition” ---From The
Quotations of Chairman Joe
It
should be clear from the foregoing posts that conservatism, brought to its
conclusion, is a dead end proposition.
While it is true that, as old Ben Franklin would remind us, a penny
saved is a penny earned, it is also true that one can save oneself out of
business. This was certainly true of the
Butterfield Corporation and, as I left property maintenance in Athens,
management faced with over 50% vacancies in the office building raised rents at
the apartment complex. This, because of
the student base upon which the business rests and because yearly migrations
produce high turnovers, resulted in a few short months of reducing occupancy at
the apartments from 97% to around 75%. The
downward spiral had begun demonstrating, once again, that bedrock conservatism
is not only a poor model for governance, but doesn’t even produce a workable
model for small businesses.
Every
election cycle the citizenry is bombarded with loaded political messages. Propaganda is another term for it. The oracles on the political Wrong would have
us believe that if we would only exercise enough discipline and work ourselves
into a debt-free condition a new era of unlimited prosperity awaits us. The problem with this “Morning in America”
mentality is that it never did and never will work.
Conservatism
is always running amok not only science and reason, but the historical
record. The facts are overwhelming, in
fact bordering upon universal observation and experience, that—as Professor
Galbraith has more than once reminded us—all eras of economic advancement have
involved debt. Sometimes a great deal of
debt. The debate should be about how
much debt, not about whether there will be debt at all. For as was demonstrated here in the microcosm,
a debt-free condition does not produce strength but weakness and, in the end,
collapse. Had Butterfield borrowed money
and kept up with the times, using its
business leverage by having the stock holders let the customers, in effect,
finance the expansions, it could very well have survived the times. The same is true with the operations in
Athens. But the ‘ideological’ imperative
was at work forcing management into a series of knee-jerk budget cuts that in
the end hollowed out the enterprises.
The
“Ideological Imperative” manifests itself in the rhetoric of the Wrong. Appeals are made to the fears and anxieties
of the political marketplace by asserting that we must adopt policies of
austerity lest we fall into a pit of fire and brimstone. You’ve heard the message: families have to balance their budgets, so
must the government. Overlooked is the
fact that the government is responsible for the value of the currency and the
health of the economy; but that is in large measure beside the point. The fact is that families don’t live on
balance budgets in the first place. It
is worth noting that prior to the financial meltdown of 2007, when government
had to do some serious borrowing; private debt was far greater than public
debt. Experience trumps ideology. Every household knows that there will be no
home ownership, no automobile, hell no refrigerator or washing machine or
indeed lawn mower without accompanying debt.
Debt, it emerges, is not a bad thing.
In fact it can be quite the opposite.
Nevertheless,
we are now in the grips of a government ‘shut-down’ orchestrated by the
teabaggers and their malignant representatives stalking the halls of Congress. At issue is financing the Affordable Health
Care act, otherwise known as Obamacare.
Once again the idiot Wrong is willing to drive us to the point of
economic crisis in a knee-jerk reaction to further investments in
ourselves. As the experiences of life in
the marketplace suggests when we recoil from investing in ourselves nothing but
hardship can be the result.
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