The End of Free Money

With all eyes turned to the state of the U.S. economy and the unprecedented drop in stocks on the DJIA I would like to offer two thoughts.

First, we have to realize that most American's were complicit in this unraveling of our economy. We all wanted something for free. It doesn't matter if you were a Democrat or a Republican, the bulk of the worst policy decision's were made back when Clinton was still in office. Sure a lot of the deregulation was spurred on by House Republican's in general and Phill Graham in particular but we have to get past the blame game.

The simple fact is that true fiscal convservativeism bit the dust in 2000. With it went the last shreds of controls of our Capital markets. We were able to maintain the appearance of prosperity for a large portion of the last eight years but know we are seeing just how hollow those gains were.

Now that we have had any economy addicted to free money and fake progress we are just now crashing back to our inevitable economic reality. The fact is that free market systems are winner take all with out regulation. That left an awful lot of Americans faced with ever dimmer prospects for real wealth acquisition. Meanwhile for the 20 years we have allowed a very narrow sliver of people to reap ALL of the benefit's of our economy. I think we are all going to have to take a good hard look at the post-depression policies of Roosevelt and realize that we are going to see a lot of people waking up socialists.

Sorry Sean Hannity. We shouldn't give huge tax breaks to the rich while people who have busted their ass for our nation, fought our wars, taught our children, built our roads have woken up to find they can't actually buy homes, afford health care, or send their children to school.

And that brings me to my second point. This may look like a catastrophe, and we are definitely going to feel the hurt in every level of our society. But there are two things that are going to change in the next 10 years. At first this is going to rip us apart, but a day will come when we wake up and realize what really matters to us. From the C.E.O. of the Exxon to the bum on the street, we are all in this together, and the selfishness, greed and stupidity have to stop. Second we are going to learn that you have to make real progress, it is not enough to have people living from paycheck to paycheck, digging an ever deep ditch. It's time to go back to the way things worked in the 40's, 50's, and 60's and abandon the idea of the Milton Friedman's, the Neo-Consertative Deficit Spending, and even Wall Street now. This is the end of something for nothing and money for free.