Economic Vanity

As I have said here before, the Economic Stimulus Package cannot work because it is nothing more than handing taxpayer dollars back to the taxpayers with instructions to spend them on frivolous goods and services.

It is the economic equivalent of vanity.

The bill will briefly stimulate local economies but this effect is sustainable only as long as stimulus dollars are available to spend. It will not typically result in new jobs, and will only temporarily stave off the loss of existing ones. Indeed, it may not even do that.

At the end of this Yellow Brick Road, the only economies that may possibly be stimulated are those belonging to the countries that supply us with television sets and iPhones.

There is a way it could work, but it may violate antitrust laws.

An article that I wrote and never posted referred to economies as quasi-living machines lacking any sort of conscience and caring about nothing. The one absolute and constant reality of any economy is that in the beginning, as surely as God created the Heavens and the Earth, economies require something to be created from nothing.

This of course is impossible.

Unless it was created a long time ago and we pull it out of the ground now.

We have become so used to a service economy that we have forgotten that it is possible to use raw materials. We still have them, but by and large it became too expensive to extract them, either because of labor expenses or the cost of mining in a way that is environmentally acceptable.

Enter the Stimulus Package, the Magic Money, and the BailOutBucks. Whatever we call them, they are perfect for going back to the dirt under our feet and pulling things we can use out of it.

Instead of giving all this cash to ordinary people who will typically squander it even without instructions to do so, give it to the big, evil corporate entities with strict instructions that this is to alleviate the costs of once again producing raw materials and selling them to manufacturers.

If they cheat, then they get to build the brick walls they will stand in front of in their corporate board rooms as the firing squads are led in.

You seem to think I’m kidding.

America was built on the land with materials pulled from the land. Stimulus dollars could effectively allow us to rebuild America, but like it or not, we need Corporate America to do it.

Otherwise, we will just watch more TV.