How Big the Coming Economic Tsunami?
Rod Dreher, in The Dallas Morning News Opinion blog, is sounding the alarm that the sky is falling. What with the financial bailout, our already staggering deficit, and the future liabilities built into Social Security and Medicare, Dreher feels like somebody watching the oceans draw away just before the tsunami hits.
People need to keep things in perspective. When economists warn us that we're facing the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression, that means that it's not as bad as the Great Depression. It's still plenty bad, but not as bad as Dreher fears. We have a lot going for us today that we didn't back then. We have FDIC, unemployment insurance, and government officials who have learned a thing or two from the experience of the Great Depression. We're not likely to see the depths we saw in the 1930s (soup lines and shantytowns) nor the duration (a decade-long slump that WWII finally brought us out of).
Whether our politicians have the will to administer the bitter medicine needed to pull us through these bad times is the critical question. I admit that history, certainly the last eight years, does not give us much cause for hope. For two years, Barack Obama has promised us change we need, change we can believe in. Now, it's time for him to deliver.
Elsewhere in the blog, William McKenzie expresses his misgivings over "giantism," the notion that some enterprises are "too big to fail." And we grow governments too big to afford, populations too big to educate, health care systems too big to manage, etc.
The problem is not that our institutions have gotten too big, it's that they have gotten out of control. In the 19th Century, businesses were allowed to grow unregulated and the boom and bust business cycles were as ferocious as anything we're seeing today. The Great Depression was the mother of all busts. FDR's New Deal tamed business's excesses and created a business environment that resulted in four decades of stable prosperity and growth as strong as any in our nation's history. Starting in the 1980s, there was a pendulum swing back towards laissez-faire capitalism, starting with Ronald Reagan's declaration that government isn't the solution to the problem, government is the problem and ending with today's collapse of the housing market, the financial industry, and the automobile industry. It's time for the pendulum to swing back towards rational regulation. The business cycle will never be tamed, but at least its worst excesses can be managed, given the political will to do so. Again, it's time for Barack Obama to deliver.
2 comments:
You're missing Rod Boy's point. He WANTS society to collapse so that we'll all have to live according to his medieval ideals. Or so he imagines.
Dreher's forecasts of doom and gloom are old hat, but I don't think he wants disaster to strike us, unlike some evangelicals who seek to advance their end-times theology or terrorists like Osama bin Laden who dream of a new Caliphate arising from the ashes of civilization's destruction. Rod's an Orthodox Christian. He's more into incense and icons, not Armegeddon. I think.
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