Poverty of the spirit

There’s a misconception that economics is a field of study concerned with money. Actually, money is a very small subset of the science. In fact, the basic theory of economics doesn’t usually use dollar signs at all. Money is that peripheral of an issue.

Which is an elbow in the ribs of conventional wisdom, which regards all economic problems as shortages of money. Well, wanna’ know what? A lot of problems are because too much–as opposed to not enough–money is at issue.

Examples? Well…how about American ghettos? They exist because the government pays the shiftless to have children, the irresponsible to remain reckless, and the lazy to remain inert. Why would anybody create this scene? Because generations of socio-economic mutants–who can’t survive without government checks–are a renewable resource for certain political interests.

Farmers grow, reap, and re-seed, crops. Socialist politicians do the same with stupid people. Such votes are the ultimate renewable resource. And it’s important to understand that this crop has now reached critical mass in the United States. Its dead weight dominates the levers of power. The fact that the vote of a crack smoking welfare mom equals that of a brain surgeon doesn’t matter unless there are more welfare moms, and unless they are more fertile than the surgeons.

Gee…do your own projection on that one, sport.

If you flew over a ghetto in a helicopter, dropping out $100 dollar bills, what would happen? For every million dollars per square block that landed, you’d have calls for more police, more social programs, and more doctors, (all government funded)to tend to the ills of more drugs, more stupidity, and more health related manifestations thereof. The more money Uncle Sam pours into the ghettos, the more problems they can afford to concoct. Which, for Uncle Sam, is a great deal, since such concoctions always result in more government power.

Indeed, while capitalism recognizes that money can uncork a virtuous cycle of wealth creation, democratic socialism runs the other way: money feeds government programs that are like self-sustaining human fires, requiring ever-increasing amounts of money to deal with.

Consider this: a welfare mom with six offspring, each of whom breeds six, each of whom does likewise…will have created 216 voters in the span of a few decades. Two-hundred-sixteen to one! I don’t know of any financial deals that have that kind of return on investment. Heck, I’ve been involved in cattle ranching, and we couldn’t even get cattle to multiply like that.

Even Karl Marx reckoned that urban socialists would be workers. Not even the Marxster himself could have envisioned hordes of urban socialists who didn’t even have to work. Never mind the working oppressed when the non-working entitled enter the scene; they breed faster than mere laboring proles and can afford Air Jordans, too. I wish Mr. Marx was in the here and now so we could both share a chuckle over the situation.

He’s not. But we are, and it’s fun to watch the United States heading for the social train wreck that will result.

Ed Stephens, Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. “Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com”