Government employee salaries + benefits + pensions = bubble.
Government schools K-12 = bubble.
Higher education = bubble.
MSM monopoly = bubble.
The foundations of the opposition are crumbling before our eyes.
We are on the verge of a table-clearing, systemic regime collapse.
Once in a century change is coming.
Be happy.
Hope & Change!
I want to believe. You’ve put a huge grin on my face this morning.
Useful to put it all together like that. Remember, though, all of the above institutions have people who benefit from their existence, typically have no alternative employment in which they could do as well, and hence will fight like demons to preserve what they have.
As David saidd, those folk benfitting from the bubbles won’t go peaceably in the night. Nevertheless, I look forward with great joy to flushing into the sewer the offal of liberalism. Can’t happen soon enough!!
But noone really knows what comes next or whether it is any better.
I agree with some of the other commenters that people will fight hard to keep what is theirs. Or what they perceive to be theirs. Change to these institutions will happen, regardless, but people will fight for advantage. They always do.
– Madhu
Additionally, Social security + baby boom = bubble
Government monetization of the debt = bubble
So, what? Gold? Swiss Francs? Silver coins? Stocks?
or, on a more basic level, a house in the country with a garden?
Someone recently advised the “3 Bs”, (over on Hell in a Handbasket, I think it was)”Beans Bullets and Bullion”.
The lies, bribes, pandering, and earmarks of Congress
+ its race and sex grievance politics
+ class warfare taxation and redistribution
+ objections to foreign wars, torture, rendition, Gitmo and domestic surveillance– only under Repubs
+ Rinos
+ sea change healthcare mandates for embetterment of people (bureaucrats)
+ sea change environmental regs and taxes for green (money)
+ socialist insolvent government-managed security and medical schemes
+ Keynesian spending sprees, magical accounting, bail-outs, stratospheric debt, and strangling and captured regulation
+ multicultural moral equivalence blather and Blame America First syndrome
+ ignoring (and depending on) voting corruption, to include in Senator Saturday Night Live’s home state
= bubble
Maybe it’ll pop soon, or we’ll keep getting the Congress we deserve.
The POP won’t be pretty, but is going to happen.
Iron law: If something cannot continue, it won’t.
Let’s be ready with Plan B as the foundations of the world most people believe starts to crumble. There is deeper bedrock to build on.
In this conflict, it will often be advisable to avoid backing people into corners and to build alliances where appropriate. For example, there are many academics who are good people and who are in sync with aspects of our critique of the “progressivism” that is wreaking so much destruction. It would be wise to avoid alienating these people by overly-broad attacks on “intellectuals.”
The problem is not smart academics. Some of my best friends are smart academics. The problem is people who think being smart qualifies them to compel everyone else to comply with their vision of the world, who cannot grasp that the information required to keep us alive is distributed and must be aggregated by voluntary action, and that the smart people giving orders cannot come anywhere near doing the job.
Intellectuals who disagree with the current consensus grumble in private because they are afraid of losing their jobs, or just social disapproval.
Not many are willing to pay that price.
The popping of the current higher educatio bubble will be liberating for free speech and the open exchange and debate of ideas.
We could also add medical cost to the list of bubbles.
The thing that all these bubbles have in common is distortion caused by government intervention. Bubbles can form in the free-market of course. They are caused by a lag in the feedback between the time an investment/purchase is made and the payoff/utilization. For example, people buy a house expecting its value to rise years down the road. They don’t know if they made a mistake until it comes time to sell the house. People borrow large sums for their education but won’t know if it was worth it until they reach middle-age and their peak income. However, free-market bubbles are much smaller because people have to pay more up front to drive them.
Government intervention intensifies bubbles significantly by reducing the risk signals transmitted by the upfront cost. People would buy less housing and lenders less if the government did not intervene to significantly reduce the cost. People would pay less for their education and educators would charge less if the government did not subsidize their loans. People would demand lower cost health care if they had to pay the bills directly. Even the MSM bubble is government created owing to the government’s political allocation of broadcast spectrum.
Since the Great Depression, the governments of the developed world have told the people that the government could get them something for nothing. The current financial crisis resulted from the government telling people that they could magically get money for housing at far below market rates.
These government bubbles are hard to see because they are so large relative to the total economy and because they take so long to form. The housing bubble took thirty years to form and occurred almost everywhere. It was so broad and long frequency that it looked like the entirety of the market itself. It was like a tsunami passing under a ship on the ocean. It looks like the entire ocean is rising so the people on the ship don’t see the wave. Many people in finance spent their entire careers working inside the housing bubble and considered it the normal market.
The only way to prevent these mega-bubbles is to get the government out of the markets. You can’t get something for nothing. All government programs based on the premise that the government can create wealth out thin air should end. Things cost what they cost and we should just accept that.
Shannon – that comment is very interesting and deserves a post of its own.
Big government bubbles are also hard to see for the same reason that people get taken in by Ponzi schemes: the benefits are ‘secretly’ drawn from later arrivals.
In fact, as Mark Levin often says, virtually all these government programs are effectively Ponzi schemes and the politicians who push them into being, instead of being praised and honoured as compassionate people, should now be wearing orange jumpsuits in a cell alongside Bernie Madoff. There, I said it! Thank me!
“It was like a tsunami passing under a ship on the ocean. It looks like the entire ocean is rising so the people on the ship don’t see the wave. Many people in finance spent their entire careers working inside the housing bubble and considered it the normal market”
Supports Warren Buffett’s line: “You can’t teach a new dog old tricks.” People who have been around for a while have a better chance of having lived through a few market cycles. Of course, when the cycles are long enough, there can be no such people, and the only hope for understanding is the study of history…which can never have quite the same immediacy as personal experience.