I'm no economist. If you don't believe me, ask my mortgage company, check my credit rating and bank account ... never mind. Don't bother. Trust me. Investments and all that have never interested me.
But history does. While in college, even though it was not my actual major, I took enough hours in history to have a degree, enough to get me into graduate school where I hoped to get a masters in history with the idea of teaching.
I never finished graduate school, simply because it is difficult to work the crazy hours and writing deadlines of the sports section of any newspaper and take classes and work on writing a thesis.
However, I did get to teach history for about seven years - high school history, American history mostly but also some world history. I did well enough that when some of my students went on to some of the better high schools in the area and took history, they felt they were ahead of what they were being taught. It was gratifying.
Over the years, I developed two theories of history. One is that everything is financial. Follow the money. Economic history is usually the key to any incident in world history.
The second - and the one I tried to use to help my students understand events - was that events that motivated conflicts between nations or competing parties can usually be broken down to the same motivations that create conflict between people. Nations and governments are, after all, made up of people. And whether kings or premiers or generals - they're still just people.
What I'm trying to get to is this economic crisis our country finds itself in - you know, out-of-control debt and loans that we're having to borrow just to make interest payments and looking at where the money goes and seeing everything as a necessity and nothing is a luxury.
So one side, the liberal side, says the answer is we have to just raise our debt limit so we can borrow more money. Or else we need to print more money.
Of course there is the option of earning more money - but let's face it, anyone of us knows that's the hardest way to go. It takes work. And there are only so many hours in a day and so many jobs to go around, and borrowing based on the idea that I'm going to get a better paying job somewhere in the near future is kind of how the housing market bubbled and burst.
Further compounding the issue is that government really doesn't earn money. It collects money based on what its citizens earn. Import taxes, export taxes, income taxes, interest earned - it's all off money made by what someone else produces, and the government simply expects its cut.
And that's OK. It's what we do to fund government to provide the truly necessary services like national defense, courts, protection, roads.
Wow, I'm preaching.
But here's the thing: what do you do when your own personal debt is getting out of control? Well, you can borrow more hoping that you'll get a better job or win the lottery or Publisher's Clearinghouse will ring your doorbell or that somehow, magically, the bank will lose your note and suddenly you're free and clear...
Or, while hoping those things happen (after all, they could), you take what you have and start to figure out what you don't need, what you can sell, what you can do without ... you know, the same way that your parents got out of debt, the same way your grandparents got out of debt, the same way their parents got out of debt, and their grandparents and their grandparents and their ... do you see the pattern?
The fact that some generations cut back and reduce debt and the nation's economy improves and creates an economic environment that the next generation abuses and gets into debt and drives the economy back into trouble is not the fault of the system. It's the fault of people not understanding some things always hold true, that eventually you pay the piper and if you do it on a loan, there will be interest involved that has to be paid.
What I don't understand is why certain people in government or public policy seem to think that despite generations and thousands of years of the repeating cycles of history, they have a better way.
Instead of looking at what has gotten people out of debt for centuries - or what has kept people out of debt - they are convinced this other way that has failed so often in the past will work this time because this time is different.
And they refuse to recognize that what works in their own house is also what works for a nation. Economic principles are the same.
Over-simplification? Probably. But tell me that it doesn't work, that it wouldn't work.
Did you hear Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke tell Congress that gold is not money? That it's just "tradition" that we value gold so much?
There they go again, trying to throw out thousands of years of economic history to try something that has never worked.
Sure, we could use other things to back the value of money: silver, copper, clam shells, bubble gum wrappers. It has to be something we all agree has a certain amount of value however.
And since the world has already accepted gold has having value, why change? Why not just use the tried and true practices that have been proven over time and centuries, and stay with them?
I absolutely believe in the need for two political parties. And I absolutely believe the two parties can have different priorities, and different ideas on what is crucial to the well-being of the country.
But when we forget history, as Santayana said, we're doomed to repeat it.
Which means ultimately we have to look to the same solutions to get us out of whatever mess we've gotten ourselves in.
No comments:
Post a Comment