[ExI] The bailout

[Damien Broderick]

At 07:50 PM 9/30/2008 -0600, samantha wrote:

>unless massive government spending cuts were made
>the government's standard activities would result in massively more
>debt.  There is no improving the economy without greatly reducing the
>massive sucking of wealth by the government.

This might well be true (and we know that government doesn't do 
anything with this appropriated wealth, just shovels it into vast 
fires or pits where it is destroyed), but the odd thing in the 
current situation (which I've heard described as a "crisis," possibly 
of unprecedented proportions) is that a collusive or even corrupt 
government first *de*regulated *private* *corporations,* allowing 
those large businesses to foist astonishing amount of debt on smaller 
US businesses and private consumers (sometimes called "fools") far 
beyond their plausible capacity to pay this debt: a Ponzi scheme, I 
think I've heard it called. This massive sucking of wealth was 
*allowed* by government, possibly even *helped along* by it, but (as 
far as I know) the massive sucking and wealth siphoning (which I've 
heard described as "highway robbery" or "extortion" or 
"sucker-punching brain-dead idiots") wasn't done by government 
agencies. That's the odd thing. Perhaps, though, if government 
spending was shut down largely or entirely, this conniving and 
thievery wouldn't hurt so badly, because there'd be more wealth to siphon up.

But I might be wrong about all this. I do find America so difficult 
to understand. For example, I'm still puzzling over Mr. McCain's 
insight that Mr. Obama was responsible for a vote that was lost 
because more Republicans than Democrats voted in the negative. That's 
another odd thing.

Damien Broderick