“Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for. The world is full of so- called economists who in turn are full of schemes for getting something for nothing. They tell us that the government can spend and spend without taxing at all; that it can continue to pile up debt without ever paying it off, because “we owe it to ourselves.”
Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest & Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics
“There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: “In the long run we are all dead.” And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.”
Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest & Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics
Having witnessed the economic woes inflicted deliberately by those who allegedly know better but do it any way is criminal and we all know it and until they are stripped of everything and everything of value is clawed back and they are prosecuted and chained for life yes that includes the gifts and wealth transfers to family because receiving stolen goods even if you don’t know it is still illegal and must be forfeited ! I am well aware of the scope of damage and prosecuting and stripping those in congress and Wall Street who benefited is financially meaningless but they must feel real and total loss as punishment ! When you do it and you know it’s wrong but “everybody else is doing it” that’s when you are supposed to man or woman up ! Sadly there is no intellectual morality left but a few of us were taught it and we recognize when it’s missing ! Some days I still feel my fathers light hand slapping the back of my head with the comment “you know better than that” and he was correct I did ! Sadly between Wall Street , K-Street and Congress we need my dad there with a Louisville Slugger to the back of many a head , just as a moral lesson to Watch what hell you are doing , there are consequences
At the University of Chicago, Prof. Leo Strauss taught many of the neocons; people like Paul Wolfowitz, that lying, cheating, stealing and killing were all perfectly fine for the so called ‘elite’. Strauss thought morality was a joke. [see: The University of Chicago is a Moral Cesspool]. How they missed the reality that most humans can feel in their bones I do not know, but miss it they did. There is a law; a universal moral law that is perfect and inescapable. We have always understood this law and reflected this insight with saying such as, ‘he who lives by the sword, will die by the sword’. Or the more modern colloquialism, ‘what goes around comes around’. This perfect law is simply the Law of Cause and Effect; to every action there will be an equal and opposite reaction. Blow-back’s a bitch.