Friday, August 10, 2012

“Money tree very pretty,…”

“…and the money flower is sweet.”

That is the way the song of some years ago went, isn’t it?  Or are we mis-remembering something? 

(Before we move on, you might want to open a fresh gallon of Kool-Aid, so you can get in the mood for what follows.)

             

Well, no matter, because the concept of money growing on trees in government orchards is ever so au courant.  Especially in academic circles.  For proof, take a gander at this doozie from last Sunday’s big city paper.  It’s intriguingly titled “Why baseball can never run out of home runs….or the U.S. government out of money.”  It was written by Susan Feiner, a professor of economics and of women and gender studies at the University of Southern Maine.

If it doesn’t make your jaw drop, than you haven’t done your homework for understanding where this country is headed (think California, Stockton, etc.)  Quick, grab for something by Thomas Sowell or Milton Friedman.

The column contains ‘hits’ like these:

Money, in all its gore and all its glory, is no more significant and no more substantial than a home run, a field goal or a service winner.

The United States is the only entity that can legally create dollars. We are "sovereign in our own currency." Our government spends dollars, borrows dollars and pays interest in dollars. That's why we can't run out of them.

In other words, if you can simply print more dollars whenever you wish, how can you ever run out of them?  Which should immediately make you wonder why we have to pay taxes.  Can’t our delegation just call for more printing on our behalf?  What’s the problem here?

This goes a long way towards explaining why most ‘public servants,’ from local to federal, seem to spend like money is no object.  In the minds of our elite betters, it simply isn’t.  Don’t worry, spend happy!

As chance often has it, we were reading an editorial in the Weekly Standard that touches upon the pathology at work here, at least tangentially.  In an item titled Unemploy Obama, this passage appears:

Like other obsessive gamblers who cannot recognize failure until they are ruined, he (Obama) wants to double down—make the same bet again in the hope that this time he will roll prosperity instead of more joblessness. Ideologues, like addicted gamblers, reject experience as a teacher. And when they are gambling with other people’s money, they have little incentive to change, especially if they can count on a winning personality to persuade supporters to overlook the minor matter of oncoming penury.

Reading the Feiner column is a stunning reminder of just how lost on the j-axis some folks can become as they work their little fannies off to rationalize gender fluidity or economic stupidity.  Only one thing can make it worse, and that’s realizing that we are paying for their work with our tax dollars so that they can fill impressionable young minds with this poppycock.  We hope the professor is appropriately grateful for us keeping her intellectual bong full of whatever she has to smoke to come up with this stuff.

There’s another dimension to this fine example of academic freedom at taxpayer expense.  Feiner and her fellow feminists are committed to the principle that there is no such thing as ‘objective reality;’ there is only ‘narrative.’

In a 2008 interview, Feiner said that her "feminist economics" follows the "feminist" multiculturalist agenda to 'liberate' science from objectivity, which they regard as "male":

"Feminist economics differs from mainstream, orthodox, plain vanilla economics in a couple of major different ways. First, or at least first for me, is that feminist economics is deeply influenced by feminist 'science studies,' the scholarship that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s (continuing today) which shows the deep flaws in the idea that knowledge is 'objective'."

We wonder what happens when Feiner and friends sit under an apple tree.  Do the apples fall up?  Or do they move sideways before traveling further to avoid hitting the professor on her head?

Soaking this all in, we’re left with one pressing question.  Just what do they use to fertilize all those money trees in the orchard?

Oops; never mind.  We think we just figured it out, and we suspect the supply is endless.  So you can stop worrying your silly little heads, and just go out and get that free lunch.

And stop grinding your molars about the fact that 30% of the people in this country receive some kind of welfare payment, and that doesn’t include Medicare or Social Security.  A few clicks here, a few clicks there, and voila!  It’s all good!

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