Fat, Dumb, and Happy
"Stocks fell Wednesday after consumer prices showed a larger-than-expected increase in January, touching off concerns that inflation might not dissipate as Wall Street has hoped." ~AP
What a lame report. "Inflation might not dissipate as Wall Street has hoped." How can journalists put such stuff on the national news wires and expect to be taken seriously? Surely they know the Federal Reserve has been flooding the economic system with newly created dollars. How could this NOT lead to price inflation? What are they thinking?
Apparently, they are not thinking at all. If journalists don't understand what is happening how can they inform the general population? We have more journalists, commentators, and "economists" assailing us with information about money topics than ever, but the citizenry know less about the basics of handling money and credit than their grandparents did. Is this the familiar "pursuit of happiness" mentioned in the famous Declaration of Independence in July of 1776?
The old phrase "Fat, dumb, and happy" comes to mind. I'll bet that's what Tom Jefferson had in mind while penning that testy letter to the King of England. "...that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the right to become fat, dumb, and happy." I can hear someone like Ben Franklin suggesting that the fat, dumb, and happy line be struck and "the pursuit of happiness" substituted.
More than two centuries passed and Americans achieved their happiness, but got stuck with fatness and dumbness, anyway. Just check the girth of the people wandering the shopping malls if you doubt Americans are overweight. Hold a conversation with the average citizen if you doubt his general ignorance of how the complications of modern life fit together. "Dumb" is another word for it. He may know all the participants on "American Idol" but for heaven's sake don't pin him down on who represents him at the state capitol or in Washington, or why the country has run itself so deeply into debt.
A reader recently scolded me for being "hung up on money." Were that true I would be a very rich man, but I have never been hung up on money and think of it chiefly as a useful tool for facilitating exchanges. I certainly wouldn't want to have to barter my time for a bag of groceries. But I am very interested in how the public has been misled about the nature of money and credit by politicians and the hucksters of the financial industry. People have been taught to consider themselves wealthy if they have little or no savings and carry heavy debt for their houses, cars, and college expenses. The promise of an ever increasing supply of money (inflation) has kept everything afloat and it would be hard to find anyone to worry about it ever coming to a sad end.
So, with the media cheerleaders leading the chant we roll more deeply into the 21st century viewing inflation as a minor inconvenience that the geniuses in Washington will fix, one of these days. Ask journalists to define inflation and one or two might consult their dictionaries. Most will shrug and say, "Thus it has always been," as if inflation is as inevitable as rain and sunshine.
To quote myself, no inflation in the history of humankind has ever NOT STOPPED. How this long-running episode winds down should be of extreme interest to everyone, but until the journalists and commentators catch on to who's causing it and what the consequences will be Americans will take to their TVs and couches with their bags full of snacks and remain in that Constitutional Nirvana....fat, dumb, and happy.
John Wrisley, Feb. 22, '07
Great
Depression, Part 2
Scuttled; The Ship of
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Américains crédules