The Financial Advice of Experts, Then and Now

By Alan Caruba

“I see nothing in the present situation that is either menacing or warrants pessimism…I have every confidence that there will be a revival of activity in the spring, and that during the coming year, the country will make steady progress.” That’s what William Mellon, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, had to say on December 31, 1929. The Great Depression would last until 1941 when the U.S. entered World War Two.

“Could we have a crash a la 1929? The flat answer is no.” So said Dr. Pierre A. Rinfret, a noted economist, writing in Time magazine on October 5, 1987 and, on October 19, 1987—instantly dubbed “Black Monday”—the Dow Jones average plunged 508 points.

Despite the pronouncements of Presidents and pundits, it was the December 30, 1929 edition of Variety, a newspaper for the entertainment industry, that got it right. The day after the crash its headline read, “Wall Street Lays an Egg.”

All through history, the opinions of “experts” have been subject to revision and derision. The Internet has simply multiplied our access to a multitude of opinions. It behooves us all to pick our experts very carefully. A good track record is always a good sign, along with a healthy measure of common sense.

As the economies of the U.S. and several European nations totter on default it is essential to draw on lessons from the past. The most obvious lesson is that the governments of the U.S. and the Europeans have been spending far more than they can tax or borrow.

All have spent decades since the 1980s wasting billions on “alternative” sources of energy in the name of global warming or climate change. All have stayed busy before and since the end of World War Two consolidating power in the U.S. federal government and more recently in the European Union.

Herbert Hoover on whose watch Wall Street crashed in 1929 generally gets the blame, but five years earlier in an address to the annual meeting of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Hoover said, “The test of our whole economic and social system is its capacity to cure its own abuses,” warning that, “If we are to be wholly dependent upon government to cure these abuses, we shall by this very method have created an enlarged and deadening abuse through the extension of bureaucracy and the clumsy and incapable handling of delicate economic forces.”

“The clumsy and incapable handling of delicate economic forces.” Spoken nearly 90 years ago!

What a perfect phrase to describe what the nation has been passing through as Congress during the last days of the Bush administration and the passed two and a half years of the Obama administration has demonstrated.

The financial crisis of late 2008 was the result of government “entities”, Fannie Mae, created in 1938, and Freddie Mac, created in 1970, both intended to stimulate the housing market by securing the loans made by banks for the purpose of giving everyone, including those who could least afford it, the opportunity to own a house. By the time the crisis hit, they jointly owned more than 50% of all U.S. mortgages.

The failure of communism in the former Soviet Union (1922-1991) should be proof enough that government ownership of property and the means of production is one of the all-time bad ideas of the last century. A modified version exists in China with other versions existing from North Korea to Cuba. All depend on oppression and coercion.

The irony, of course, is that the Great Depression was extended by Hoover’s successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who believed that expanding the role of government was the best way to bring the Depression to an end. Instead, the Depression, experienced as well by European nations in the wake of World War One, gave rise to totalitarian governments and World War Two.

There is a reason that President Obama’s approval ratings, along with those of Congress, are at record lows. Most astonishing is the fact that, when Obama took office, the Democrats controlled both houses of the legislature, the Senate and the House. Even more astonishing, Obama pursued the same failed programs of FDR, most famously sponsoring a multi-billion dollar “stimulus” bill, along with taking over General Motors and Chrysler, ginning up a Cash-4-Clunkers program, and discovering belatedly that there were few “shovel ready” infrastructure projects.

By 2010, the voters returned political power in the House of Representatives to the Republican Party, largely on the basis on newly minted “Tea Party” candidates. Obama’s Congress had rejected his proposed budget and the nation has been operating with “continuing resolutions” to fund its activities and a massive battle over raising the debt ceiling for the same purpose. A farcical congressional “super committee” has been told to cut a trillion and a half dollars out of government spending.

The economic advisers that Obama brought into the White House have all departed with the exception of the Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner. The various government departments continue to spend millions authorized by the Congress every week or engage in dubious “loan guarantees” which give every indication of being a series of Solyndra scandals.

Despite the increasingly absurd assertions of the President, it’s not just corporations, large and small, making decisions about the current and near-term future of the economy. It is the vast body of Americans who are deciding what to purchase, whether to expand their business by hiring or not, whether to invest in stocks or gold, and thousands of individual decisions by which the real economy is shaped.

It is their decisions that determine how long the recession lasts, not the official pronouncements about when the last one “ended” or a new one begins. Economists of a conservative point of view know what must be done and should be listened to, but they are not advising this President, nor guiding the government’s decisions.

In the midst of this latest of many financial crisises at home and abroad, the campaign for the next presidential election has begun. Much depends on who John Q. Public elects to the office. Much depends on the long, hard slog to reduce the size and grasp of the federal government.

Will the wisdom of “the crowd” prevail over the present “experts” affecting the economy?

Stay tuned.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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A Week of Horrid Headlines

By Alan Caruba

Journalism is often called “History written in a hurry.” If so, last week’s headlines from the front page of The Wall Street Journal reflected a period of our current history that will likely have future historians wondering how we made it through these times without completely losing our minds.

If fear sells newspapers, drives television news ratings, gets bad laws passed, and is useful for selling all manner of other goods and services, than last week must have been very good for business.

The weekend edition, Saturday/Sunday, September 3-4, began with “Job Growth Grinds to a Halt.” The sub-headline was “Lack of Hiring in August Roils Financial Markets; Gloom Ratchets Up Pressure on Obama.” The President would have to wait until the following Thursday to roll out his “Jobs” bill and to tell a joint session of Congress, “Pass this bill now!”

Reluctant to admit its role in the housing mortgage crisis that broke in late 2008 during the political campaign and largely due to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—both of whom own 50% of U.S. mortgages—the next article on page one was “U.S. Sues Big Banks Over Home Mortgages.”

Monday was Labor Day so there was no WSJ edition, but on Tuesday, September 6, the lead headline was “Europe Signals Global Gloom” with a sub-headline, “World Markets Fall as Continent’s Debt Crisis Fuels Worries of Lengthy Slowdown.” It reminded me of the cliché that, when the U.S. sneezes, the rest of the world gets pneumonia.” Under the lead story was a headline, “Voter Discontent Deepens Ahead of Obama Jobs Plan.”

By Wednesday, September 7, the headline was “Euro Woes Stir Currency Fears” with a sub-headline, “Older Americans Held Hostage by Mortgages.”

On Thursday, September 8, the headline was “Fed Prepares to Act” with a sub-headline, “Officials Consider Unusual Steps to Avert an Economic Stall.” The nation has been stalled since 2008 when gobs of taxpayer money was used to bailout banks, an insurance company, and two major auto manufacturers. Meanwhile, an accompanying headline said, “U.S. Hits Builders with Pay Probe” about a Labor Department investigation “of the top companies in home building, hitting them with a broad demand for records that has led to complaints of regulatory overreach.” You think?

By Friday, following Obama’s speech, the lead headline was “Obama’s Bid to Spur Growth." The sub-headline was “President Asks Congress for $447 Billion in Cuts, Spending; Tepid GOP Response.” With a $14 trillion national debt, I’d be tepid, too.

The proposed bill would be paid for with tax increases that would kick in after the next election in 2012. They are the same increases a Democrat-controlled Congress refused to authorize!

The Saturday weekend edition, led off with “Banker’s Exit Rattles Markets” and a sub-headline, “In Europe, Top ECB Economist Resigns, Seen as Policy Protest; Dow Industrials Fall 303.68 points.”

Obama speaks. The Dow tanks. Coincidence? I think not.

The other lead article headline was “Treasury Weighs New Tax Scheme.” It began “Treasury floats the notion of eliminating some, but not all taxes on overseas profits of U.S. multinational companies…”

Thus, the week’s WSJ headlines were a microcosm of the fears defining the economies of the U.S. and European nations whose socialist programs and massive over-spending had landed all of them in hot water.

We expect and we want government to exercise prudence in the management of public funds, but successive administrations and congresses did not, electing always to expand government. Let's hope the Fed does not want to print more money. It will cause a collapse of confidence.

It’s September 2011. Welcome to the 1930s.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Obama's Global Incompetence

By Alan Caruba

All Presidents have had to deal with events around the world that seemed to call for a military response, but it was President Eisenhower who laid down the doctrine to avoid what he called “brushfire wars”, outbreaks such as we have seen in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and, in particular, Libya.

Eisenhower had directed the defeat of Germany in World War Two as the Supreme Allied Commander before being urged to run for president. He would serve two terms and was doubtless the right man at the right time in the nascent years of the Cold War.

President Obama seems to lack any kind of a doctrine or plan to deal with a Middle East where many are fed up with its dictators, combined with the realization of how far behind the rest of the world the region is.

It is an irony of history that, after Eisenhower squelched the British, French and Israeli plans to retake the Suez Canal following Nasser’s nationalization in 1956, in rather rapid succession, Nasser died, was replaced by Sadat who was assassinated, and a 28-year-old Mubarack then ruled Egypt until the Maghreb and Middle East exploded with turmoil this year.

Why did Obama feel compelled to say anything? Earlier he was reluctant to support the Iranians protesting the ayatollahs in Tehran, but he rushed to the Tele-Prompter to tell, not ask, Egyptian President Mubarak to step aside.

Curently, the Egyptian decision to open its borders with Gaza and Hamas bodes ill for Israel, but just about everything in the Middle East right now fits that description. And, of course, Obama took the opportunity to launch a verbal attack on our only real ally in the region with an overt mention of “1967 borders”.

The payback was a joint session of Congress in which Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu delivered a speech to which both Democrats and Republicans repeatedly gave standing ovations. It made Obama look lame, but just about everything does these days.

Will there be a surge of democracy in Egypt? No. The military will find a way to retain power, most likely coalescing behind a new president/dictator. After that, large numbers of the Muslim Brotherhood will be jailed and killed until they crawl back into their holes.

In Libya, Obama could have simply let the resistance succeed or fail. There was no compelling reason to demand Gadhafi step aside and the embrace of “humanitarian concerns” rings hollow given events in Syria. So far the only thing that Libya has demonstrated is that NATO is ill prepared to wage a war.

Reports have it that Obama and the Russians have decided Gadhafi must go, but Assad of Syria can stay despite the fact that he is currently killing that nation’s people by the score.

Obama has returned from a European tour in which he exhorted them to give the emerging Arab states billions in aid to facilitate democracy, but Obama does not seem to grasp the fact that the only state in the Middle East that is a real democracy is Israel. The rest are controlled by dominant tribal groups in one fashion or another. They always have been and they always will be.

It has apparently escaped Obama’s notice that neither the U.S., nor any of the European nations have any money to throw at a bunch of unhappy Arabs. The Saudis have lots of money, but they are too concerned about the threat that Iran poses and too smart to get involved in the shifting sands of Middle Eastern power struggles.

The U.S. has a little problem called “a debt ceiling” to resolve so it can continue to borrow money just to pay interest on the money it already has borrowed.

Unlike Eisenhower, Obama is the wrong man at the wrong time. He is poorly advised by a pack of anti-Semites and lacks any experience, military or otherwise, to make decisions about the Middle East. His knowledge of that region’s history appears to come from brief quotes off the back of a cereal box.

In over two years in office, Obama has become a massive embarrassment to America whenever he goes abroad, whether it is to prattle about global warming in Copenhagen or to insult the Queen of England.

The result is a serious deterioration of confidence that America can be relied upon to support allies. In Eastern Europe, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary are creating a regional framework for their mutual defense, fearing that neither NATO, nor the European Union, will be of much use to them if Russia gets frisky.

And you might recall that Obama denied Poland (and Europe) a missile shield, thus sending a signal to Russia that he actually trusted them. Nobody, but nobody, trusts the Russians. And it should be noted that Iran has missles that can hit Europe.

All of this invites trouble in a dangerous world because, more and more, nobody trusts America so long as Obama is in the Oval Office.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Obama vs. Israel

By Alan Caruba

Is Obama a Muslim? Does Obama hate Israel? Will Israel be attacked again? Will Iran nuke Israel? Has Maghreb and Middle Eastern turmoil flummoxed the White House? Why did Obama bow to Saudi Arabia’s king? Questions, questions, questions?

Watching President Barack Hussein Obama try to pick winners and losers in the Middle East would be amusing if it were not so deadly serious. Not a word about Syria’s slaughter of its protestors. A demand that Libya’s Gadhafi step aside and a quick retreat behind NATO’s skirts. Throwing Egypt’s Mubarack under the bus when saying nothing would have sufficed. And then there was the infamous and inauspicious start to his presidency with the “World Apology Tour” that included a stop in Cairo.

A May 11th Reuters news article published in the Jerusalem Post was titled “Obama may preempt PM’s speech to U.S. Congress.” Benyamin Netanyahu, at the invitation of Speaker John Boehner, will address the Congress on May 24. If President Obama delivers a speech about “political change in the Middle East and North Africa” prior to the PM, it will be impossible to deny that it is a deliberate effort to rebut in advance anything Netanyahu says.

Israel just celebrated the 63rd anniversary of its founding. Successive American administrations have struggled and failed to secure any peace between it and its sworn enemies. The reason is simple and obvious. Only Egypt and Jordan negotiated peace treaties with Israel and then only after having been decisively defeated in war.

Neither the Palestinian Authority, nor Hamas wants peace, nor does Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy group based in Lebanon. Not all the handshakes, Oslo Accords, and other diplomatic dances will change this.

President Obama’s special envoy, George Mitchell, whose mission it was to fashion a peace between Israel and the Palestinians just rendered his resignation. He could have saved himself the bother by not even taking the job.

The Israelis have given up territory and made countless concessions to the Palestinians without any reciprocity. Now the Palestinians are counting on the United Nations to unilaterally declare them a sovereign state. When not killing Israelis, they kill each other.

The United Nations has a long, ugly record of hostility, passing endless resolutions condemning Israel while maintaining the Palestinians as the world’s oldest “refugee” group to the tune of millions via the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

The European Union whose World War II member nations allowed their Jews to be frog-walked to Nazi concentration and death camps has also demonstrated its hostility.

America, to its credit, has always been Israel’s one true friend. During the campaign, Obama even visited the Wailing Wall to demonstrate his solidarity. Once elected, however, and to the astonishment of voters the new Obama administration was reluctant to even say that militant Islam was the enemy or to even use the word “terrorism.” It was renamed “overseas contingency operations”!

Call me a cynic but I believe that the decision to kill Osama bin Laden was not taken until the 2012 elections became a priority. Why? Because three terrorist attacks, including the Fort Hood murders, had previously been swept under the rug by the Obama administration. Moreover, the Obama Justice Department continues to threaten CIA agents with jail for the aggressive interrogation techniques that led to finding bin laden.

The Obama administration’s hostility to Israel and the rush to preempt the Israeli Prime Minister’s speech is a reflection the 180 degree reversal of all previous administration’s relations with Israel. The president’s national security advisor, John Brennan, has referred to Jerusalem as “Al Quds”, the Arabic name for the ancient and modern capital of Israel and the State Department continues to send funds to Hamas.

In a speech delivered in March 2010, Netanyahu said, “The Jewish people were building Jerusalem three thousand years ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capitol.”

The Muslim “tilt” of the Osama administration would be obvious to a blind man. At one point the U.S. Navy was instructed to call the Persian Gulf the “Arabian Gulf.” Who can forget the President’s weak response to a proposal to build a mosque within a short distance from New York’s Ground Zero, the site of 9/11?

New voices out of Egypt are calling for the abrogation of its peace treaty with Israel. Hezbollah has been removing its cache of long-range rockets (courtesy of Iran) from Syria as that regime faces opposition. Hamas, designated a terrorist organization worldwide, has joined hands with the PLO, negating any possibility for peace with Israel.

It is bad enough when various nations openly declare their hostility to Israel, but it is very dangerous when the current regime in Washington demonstrates its hostility in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

President Harry Truman recognized Israel when it declared its sovereignty on May 14, 1948. At the time he said, “I have faith in Israel and believe it has a glorious future, not just as a sovereign nation, but as the embodiment of the great ideals of our civilization.”

Israel and Americans who support it must wait for the November 2012 elections before the threat the Obama administration represents can be removed.

Israel’s enemies may not be willing to wait, seeing the present regime and time as the best and possibly the last opportunity to make good on their threat to “wipe it from the map.”

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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A World in Disarray

By Alan Caruba

It almost makes one wistful for the Cold War when the world was neatly divided between the United States and its allies against what Ronald Reagan called “the evil empire”, the Soviet Union and its satellite nations.

Trying to bring about a League of Nations after World War One virtually killed President Woodrow Wilson who suffered a massive stroke, but liberals have always been entranced with the notion that an international organization would bring an end to war. Until, that is, World War Two.

As WWII was winding down, Franklin Delano Roosevelt set to creating the United Nations and, following his death, it came into being on June 26, 1945. The preamble to its charter says:

“We the people of the united nations determined

to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and

to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and

to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and

to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,”

Yada, yada, yada!

The United Nations has devolved into a cesspool of evil and irrelevance. I cannot think of a single war, large or small, nor any genocides, it has managed to stop. There were a couple of military conflicts in which it was an active participant, mostly in the form of telling the United States to “go get’m!” and “don’t forget to wear our blue helmets.”

If there has been a force for freedom in the world, it has been the might and power of the United States of America.

Until now.

Now our President says, “No U.S. troops will be in Libya.” This administration is desperately looking for some other nation to take the lead on Libya.

Let me be clear. I have not been a fan of spending our treasure and blood for the people of the Middle East. I am not a fan of war, but I know that war is the only way that most international conflicts get settled for good or ill.

The last President, George W. Bush, put together a coalition and invaded Iraq because, well, because he really did not like Saddam Hussein who, incidentally, had been invading his neighbors since the 1980s. His father had previously done the same to drive him out of Kuwait in the first Gulf War.

If there ever was a coalition regarding Libya, it was made of sugar candy because Germany and France had serious second thoughts after a week. No fly zones, it seems, cost a lot of money to maintain and most Western nations are broke, including our own.

The Arab League that called for a no-fly zone over Libya ran away even sooner. Arabs, who have shown an unparalleled talent for killing one another, lack the stomach for anything that involves mounting a real war to stop one of their own from killing the unfortunate citizens of his satrapy.

As it is, alphabetically from Bahrain to Syria to Yemen, despots throughout the Middle East are busy right now putting down their own internal insurrections. In the late 1990s Osama bin Laden gained a lot of attention by calling for the downfall of all the monarchies and despots throughout the region and the implementation of sharia law in anticipation of a global caliphate. The Saudis exiled him as they thought this was a really bad idea despite being the protectors of Islam’s two holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

At the same time we are witnessing a remnant of the Cold War, NATO, that does not seem to be functioning all that well, nor the European Union that was formed to be an enconomic bloc and clearly not one with any kind of a military component or sense of mission.

What the world needs is decisive leadership, but instead it has the Hamlet of the White House, Barack Hussein Obama, whose initial tour of the Middle East has, in retrospect, turned out to be one that caused its despots to conclude he was a wuss, a naif, a moron.

Who’s in charge of Operation Free Libya? No one knows!

The result is a world in disarray because the one nation every other nation thought it could count upon, for better or worse, is led by the Vacationer-in-Chief, a man who thinks that merely “saying the right thing” is the same as “doing the right thing.”

The situation in Libya will not likely turn out well, nor the growing opposition in Syria. No one knows what the outcome in Egypt will be, but everyone is pleased the crowds in downtown Cairo have gone home.

Meanwhile, Hamas is gearing up to cause trouble in Israel, waging its usual Made-in-Palestine terrorism based on the Yassir Arafat Guide to Always Saying No.

It is my profound hope the Israelis will strike back very hard, but it is also my profound belief that the UN Security Council will hastily meet to pass another resolution against Israel taking any measures of self defense.

This is how really big wars break out because no one at this point wants to fight the small ones.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Video: Why the Euro is Worth Even Less than the US Dollar

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The Good Old Days

By Alan Caruba

It started with a haircut in the morning. I sat in a barber chair I had sat in initially around the age of five. In those days, the 1940s, four Italian gentlemen cut hair and it cost 25 cents for a kid and $1.25 for an adult. Same shop, but my haircut cost $16.00 not counting the tip. Except for the owner, some lovely gals cut hair there these days.

When my parents moved to an upscale suburb of Newark, New Jersey in 1942, they paid $11,000 for a three-bedroom home with a stand-alone garage. I sold it for many multiples of that and it was essentially the same house with a few improvements. I sold because, in 2000, the town had reevaluated the property and literally doubled the taxes. Ten years later, a second reevaluation was deemed worthy of an article in The Wall Street Journal.

My parents put two sons through college on the earnings of my Father, a CPA with vivid memories of the Great Depression. He was a liberal, a Democrat, and advocate of the United Nations. Starting in the 1950s Mother taught gourmet cooking in the adult schools that sprang up after the war, earning enough to purchase the family cars and otherwise contribute to the budget. They remained married for over sixty years. He never learned to drive.

After the haircut, I topped out the gas, a little under a half-tank, and paid $21 for a mixture of gasoline and ethanol, the latter mandated by the government and heavily subsidized. The cost included state and federal taxes. I can recall when gasoline in the 60s and 70s was around 60 cents a gallon. I can also remember long lines at the pumps in both 1967 and 1973-74 when the Saudis, angered by the U.S. support for Israel, implemented oil embargoes.

A visit to the supermarket these days is a carnival of sticker-shock. The price of food has been rising thanks in part to the increase of the cost of energy to produce it and the diversion of corn to produce ethanol that reduces the mileage you get from the gas you purchase and likely harms your car’s engine. Corn is a major feedstock so the cost of a steak is rising too.

During WWII, the milk was delivered to my home by a horse-drawn wagon. Before refrigeration became widely available, we kept it in an ice box that required the delivery of large blocks of ice. There was radio, but no television. If you wanted air conditioning, you had to go to the local movie theatre. Price of admission, plus popcorn cost a kid about twenty-five cents. I saw my first television program in the 1950s. Within no time, everyone had a TV.

When I attended elementary, middle and high school there was zero talk about illegal drug use because there was none and I cannot recall any mention, let alone the teaching of heterosexual or homosexual sex of any kind. The school day began with a pledge of allegiance and a prayer. We did not have a politically correct curriculum or have to listen to fantasies about the planet heating up.

We did not recycle because everyone knew it was just the garbage.

It was the rare child who came from a family that had experienced divorce or who was being raised by a single parent. There was no segregation in the north, but my high school was almost completely white. That ratio has been reversed.

The Draft ensured that every able-bodied young man would serve a minimum of two years in the military learning the arts of warfare. We had all been born early enough to have passed through World War Two as very young children. This was followed by a conflict in Korea in the 1950s when we were teens. By the time the Vietnam War came along it was a new generation of conscripts fighting it. After that, the military became entirely staffed by volunteers.

The biggest scandal of the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower involved a vicuna coat his chief of staff had accepted as a gift. It would take Watergate to stain and end Nixon’s presidency, an ugly sexual dalliance to undermine Clinton’s, and a parade of congressional felons that constitutes a non-stop perp-walk these days.

Since I was a lad the government added a Department of Education, a Department of Energy, a Department of Homeland Security, the Environmental Protection Agency, and others I cannot recall. Regulation of everything has exploded. Borrowing and spending has exploded. If anybody had told me back then that the government was broke, I would have thought he was crazy, but the debt ceiling kept being raised until there is, in effect, no ceiling.

In my memory, American society began to shift from traditional values and patterns in the 1960s. The century-long failure of the South to rid itself of the aftermath of the Civil War, the Jim Crow laws, eventually found expression among blacks, but it also caused riots in U.S. cities.

In time, gays in New York would rebel against police harassment and a whole new movement would be sparked, culminating in the demand for same-sex marriage, along with an end to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the military. The lives of women changed with the advent of “the Pill” and demands for more equality.

Sex, drugs and rock’n roll became the order of the day. We have gone from Frank Sinatra to Lady Ga-Ga. Later generations than mine share a more chaotic vision of society and a far more costly one in which to live.

It has taken the emergence of the Tea Party movement to capture and focus the independent voters who have seesawed back and forth between the comfort of Eisenhower's conservatism to the free-spending of Lyndon Johnson, the conservative values of Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama’s effort to force European-style socialism on America.

In my life, we have gone from the Great Depression to an era in which whole nations have discovered that a highly centralized government inherently cannot function without bankrupting its citizens whether they live in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Portugal, Greece or in the former Soviet Union.

As international organizations have flourished, from the United Nations to the European Union, the more unwieldy, corrupt, and grasping they have become.

We live now in the Age of Terrorism. No one in authority seems to want to acknowledge the source, the threat to civilization called Islam. Few Americans knew anything about Islam before 9/11. Now you can’t get on a plane without a full body scan and search.

If your grandpa or grandma say they miss the “good old days”, keep in mind that in many fundamental ways, they really were good.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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