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The way forward

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DixieBelle:
You MUST go read the whole thing. Pull up a chair and pour a fresh cup of  :coffee:

http://www.acton.org/commentary/486_the_way_forward.php

SNIP

Yet I stand before you tonight hopeful, even if soberly so. I say hopeful first because I am a Christian and always have a reason for hope. But also, because I am unshaken in the conviction that the idea Acton represents is precisely that ‘way out.’

That idea – which could have been an inoculation but may now have to be an antidote—is a body of thought representing a refined and proven tradition which we have attempted to represent over the whole of Acton’s history. The idea of which I speak, boiled down to its clearest expression, is the synthesis of faith and freedom; liberty and virtue; free markets and moral responsibility; between prosperity and a deep practical and personal concern for the poor and marginalized.

We have worked for nearly twenty years to limit the tendency of the State to corrupt our civil, economic and moral lives only to wake up as though overnight to massive government interventions and a near takeover of vast sectors of our economy. Let no one say to their grandchildren that when this happened there was no dissent. Tonight, I dissent!

What more proof do people need in light of the historical record that bureaucratic interventionism – I may as well say it out loud - socialism - is not the cure for what ails us but bad medicine, a poison that more and more is the principal thing that does ail us. And this medicine is precisely what has been prescribed, merely in various disguises, by almost all political leaders. Even people who have professed a free market orientation seem to have fallen prey to Bastiat’s aphorism that everybody has the illusion they can live at everyone else’s expense, without remembering that sooner or later the pocket in front of you will be empty as well. When the economic preoccupation is redistribution of wealth, rather than on removing the barriers to its production, we are in a precarious and increasingly vulnerable position.

SNIP

All too many in recent years have at times fallen prey to a consumerist mentality, which is not merely the desire to live better, but the confused idea that only in having more can we be more. Rather than the Cartesian formulation, “cogito ergo sum” we have a new one: “consumo ergo sum.”

How common it has become to live outside one’s means, whether it’s the huge flat screen TV we think we can’t do without or the newest automobile or the house larger than our income can afford. The old rallying cry, “Live free or die,” has given way to “I’ll die if I can’t have it.” Consumerism is wrong not because material things are wrong. No, the Creator pronounced his creation ‘good.’. Consumerism is wrong because it worships what is beneath us.

Then there are the imprudent risks assumed in piling up debt on mortgages with a hubris which assumed that values could only continue to rise at 10% or better per year.

To balance the heresy of consumerism, our culture has invented its opposite, environmentalism-as-holy-order. Here the virtue of thrift—a traditional, indeed, conservative virtue—is reconfigured as a ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ political demand. Thrift, that “handmaid of enterprise,” was mothered by scarcity, a scarcity that unregulated pricing in a free market has, better than all economic systems in human history, served best to mitigate. What an obscenity, then, that the principle of thrift should be employed in the mouths of those who oppose this system of natural rationing and allocation, preferring instead top down systems of distribution that would bring poverty and misery to any nation that fully embraced them.

And what must be said about the mortgage originator who sold a loan knowing the customer could ill afford it? Who cared only for the bonus that loan would generate, knowing that the loan would be sold off to some other unknowing bank within days?

And then there is Wall Street. How often the greed and avarice of Wall Street has been skewered and denounced by the East Coast cognoscenti literati, creatures who would not recognize a moral principle if it bit them in their Aspen condos. Most often Wall Street, functioning as a surrogate for the free economy, is denounced for all the wrong reasons: for seeking and making a profit, as though running in the red was somehow a moral virtue and every attempt to be productive was greed. No, if we are going to offer a moral critique of Wall Street, let us not do it because free markets allocate and produce capital, without which people’s homes and savings evaporate, or to be more precise, never get created in the first place. Rather, let us offer a moral critique because all these previously private businesses are now waddling up to the governmental trough begging to be nationalized or subsidized and demanding their share of the dole. Isn’t it obvious that once we concede the principle of a bail-out for those “too big to fail,” we invite a queue that will wrap around the globe?

But if tonight I appear to be a generous distributor of anathemas, let me now turn my attention to the institution which initiated, enabled, enhanced and will deepen and sustain this economic and moral hazard. I speak of that institution which has been doing this for the last several decades, and that is the Invasive State as opposed to a limited government. Tocqueville taught us long ago the lesson we are about to re-learn, namely that a society where the moral tie is weakened and where no one accepts responsibilities and consequences for their actions will quickly morph into an authoritarian, State-centered society.

The only society worthy of the human person is a society that embraces freedom and responsibility as its two indispensable pillars which is a society that understands that our individual good depends on our common good and vice versa. Let us reflect upon some crucial facts that are too often overlooked.

The institution of government—what many view as the first resort of charity—is the very thing that unleashed and encouraged those vices of greed and avarice and reckless use of money that got us into the current financial imbroglio. It did so by first placing a policy priority on a worthy goal, increased home ownership, but pursued it with a fanaticism that neglected other goods such as prudence, personal responsibility and rational risk assessment.

Moreover, its official banking centers enjoyed subsidies which distorted that most sensitive of price signals—the price of money—to delude both investors and consumers into believing that capital existed to support vast and extravagant consumerism when in fact no such capital and savings existed.

It’s an obvious point but one the mainstream media appears intent on missing: The financial crisis did not occur within a free market, a market permitted to work within its own indigenous mechanism of risk and reward, overseen by a juridical framework marked by clarity, consistency and right judgment. Quite the contrary. The crisis occurred within a market deluged and deluded by interventionism.

SNIP

 :bow:

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