The Economy Doesn't Need Time - It Needs Freedom • iPatriot Contributers •

Ben Bernanke said it will take 5 years for the economy to recover. Why? Is there something intrinsic about the passage of time that makes people expand businesses and hire workers? Hardly. This call for time is the politician’s way of saying, “Don’t bother me with any ideas I just want to continue what I’m doing for a while.” This prognostication could be used by someone pushing a shopping cart and would have just as much validity. It is the same argument in different form that the “Raise the deficit” politicians were using.

Ask yourself. If you were telling someone you intended to reduce spending but in the mean time you wanted to get an extension of your credit limit what in reality would you be saying? Stopping the spending in Washington will not be the result of endlessly raising the debt limit but drawing a line in the sand and stopping at the limit, then reducing spending until the budget is balanced. For all the pontificating and rationalizations this is the bottom line. If you look at the argument for securing the borders and then addressing immigration reform you have the same argument. It is an argument of necessary sequences. First you set the limit and secure it then you work toward a reasonable goal. You can’t do it by reversing the sequence. You can’t reduce spending with ever expanding debt limits and you can’t have secure borders if you put off securing them.

The politician’s creed is to postpone what he can’t resolve. This is a cowardly approach and doesn’t work in the world of reality. You can’t keep putting off bills you owe and keep borrowing to pay them. Eventually you reach the point where you are living only on borrowed money and that dries up as the interest and creditors decide for you that the line has been drawn and you are bankrupt. The United States, thanks to our government’s propensity to spend, has reached the bankruptcy stage. Like the phony inflation reporting the government will not acknowledge the predicament. By pretending things are other than they are, the politicians ( and certain academics) just keep prattling about how complex and refined their job is and it takes time to correct these disruptions. Just as throwing out the mooching brother-in-law can be done instantly so too can our dilemma be rectified by putting a screeching halt to this never ending debt limit revision.

How do we know that the methods the chairman was advocating will work? If they would work over time wouldn’t accelerating them bring the time horizon closer? Nothing has been explained how passing more laws ( which will happen over time), or increasing regulations ( which will happen over time) will boost the economy. For all we know these could be the good old days. We do know this. When the government is limited and business can thrive without political disruptions such as subsidies, price controls and government induced bubbles, prosperity happens. We have never had a fully capitalistic society where government was limited to the protection of individual rights but we can extrapolate from instances where this ideal has been approached prosperity has been the order of the day.

The five year plan of Ben Bernanke ( you remember the Soviet’s five year plans don’t you?) will never happen. Just as the debt limit will reappear so too will the next five years after this one passes. The phony arguments need to be challenged and discarded along with the perpetrators. Waiting for a revelation from these charlatans is not the answer. The very idea of placing a person in a position where such puny arguments as “more time” are accepted without analysis and explanation is worse than repugnant. Would you expect your doctor to tell you that after discovering a treatable disease that you should expect more time even though there are some things that could accelerate the cure? This is what the press and the politicians are content to live with. Why? Most of it is intellectual laziness. Keep the status quo because we have a secure position and something different might shatter this illusion we are compounding.

This is not the time for more time. This is the time to declare the government control of the economy has failed and continues to fail unless the trend is reversed. The two ingredients to reverse this trend are before us to act upon. Do not extend the debt limit and start the removal of the shackles of government from the economy. More freedom means less time required for recovery to the prosperous nation we can and should become. We are seeing the results of a movement in this direction by our new President Donald Trump. He is not asking for more time . He is not primarily a politician. He is working on reducing government time extensions such a s regulations and taxes. The immediate response by the stock market says there are millions who approve. The snots on the sidelines who live by complaining and criticizing are becoming irrelevant. And so they should.