Drink up today, for tomorrow may never come
Since “in the long run we’re all dead”, I’ve been wondering lately if I’ve been letting my “bad-attitude” get the best of me. You see, it’s getting increasingly difficult to see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. Forget the economic stats, there is a sense of unease and general “un-wellness” in people that’s positively unsettling.
My work has had me in Manhattan daily for months and the arduous commute is a ritual that almost must be shared to be endured. To that end, I’ve made some “single-serving” friends, nice people that I talk to regularly during the commute to help pass the time, but whose relationships are limited in time and space. A woman I’ll call “Aural” is worried about President Obama’s seeming naivety and the possibility of what she calls, “another 9/11″. We swap stories on where we were and how we felt on that fateful day. It’s hard to tell her not to worry.
“Mike” sees the twisted humor of it all but worries about what kind of future awaits his kids. I can relate. It is hard to have confidence in our leaders when the person third in line to the presidency alleges that the CIA (and impugns the entire intelligence community in the process) has misled her and Congress about “enhanced interrogation techniques”.
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I see this as a binary expression: either the Speaker has made a false accusation and should be removed from office or it’s the truth and we should bring those responsible to justice. I can’t get anyone to take odds on either one happening. As of yesterday, Madam Speaker stands by her accusation.
“Earl the Hip” is trying to make it to the end of his middle management career working for a large quasi-public entity. His tired and vacuous eyes are periodically punctuated by staccato rumblings about ineptitude people at work and the relentless uselessness of time spent there. He figures if he can eak out a few more years without getting “right-sized”, he’ll bail with his pension. I see in him the present and future of many. He counsels me on “being in cash” but I counter that I’ll “see his cash and raise him” via inflation. I explain that he may feel safe being in cash, but he’s likely to lose on a real, (post-inflation) basis.
I find it palpably ironic that the person to whom the “long-run” quote is attributed, British economist John Maynard Keynes, is most well-known for his work on the theories of interventionist government policies. The central theme of his work is that “modern capitalist economy does not automatically work at top efficiency, but can be raised to that level by the intervention and influence of the government.” (From Wikipedia). So essentially, anything a free-market economy can do can be outdone by government. Certainly from a spending point of view that is true.
I find it both humorous and sad that it’s the foreign press that’s beginning to see through the “news-speak” passed as journalism which we are spoon-fed from an adoring media. The main idea in this article from the U.K.’s Guardian, is that political risks usually relegated to third-world countries, are now present in the United States. This was once unthinkable as the most stable nation of laws, but the capricious and arbitrary nature of the intervention of the federal government in private enterprise cannot help but be a chilling pall over the stimulation of investment in America. Who wants to play a game when the rules not only can, but are now expected to, change as the political winds blow?
There will come a day when the interventionist party will be over, the guests will be left to recover from the proceedings and the property owners will be left to salvage what remains. The landscape will have been irreparably changed.